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Ok, we get it, “serverless” doesn’t mean “without a server.” its a misnomer. Can we all accept this now and talk about it underneath the semantics or does someo

Ok, we get it, “serverless” doesn’t mean “without a server.” its a misnomer. Can we all accept this now and talk about it underneath the semantics or does someone have the power to change it industry-wide? Just feels like every discussion about this technology is hijacked by the stupid nameto the point it’s all some can focus on.

minimaxir 8y ago
Normally, running a serverless App on something like AWS or GCP doesn't involve actually setting up a server as a part of the workflow.
013a 8y ago
"Serverless" isn't a misnomer. It's the movement of management of everything below some API and/or Runtime to outside of your organization. A technology can enable a serverless culture within an organization, but that doesn't mean every deployment of a so-called "serverless" technology is actually serverless. If I write a lambda function, but then my ops team deploys it on a piece of metal running in their closet, its not serverless. Inversely, I can write a traditional stateful NodeJS app and give it to Heroku, and it becomes Serverless. In that sense, Serverless isn't really a quality of the technology, though certain technologies are optimized to be serverless. Its a quality of how its deployed, and more importantly your organizational culture around that. Of course, technologists hate this definition because we can't just call whatever we want Serverless. Moreover, Serverless starts seeming a lot less like the desired end-state we should aim for; often it makes sense to manage your own servers, just like it sometimes makes sense to manage your own hardware. OpenFaaS can totally be serverless. But to qualify, we'd have to be talking about an underlying Kubernetes infrastructure that abstracts the metal and OS away, so something like Fargate or Azure Containers. Certainly not on DigitalOcean. Here's the signal: If I can SSH into something within the stack, it's not Serverless.

minimaxir 8y ago

Normally, running a serverless App on something like AWS or GCP doesn't involve actually setting up a server as a part of the workflow.

013a 8y ago

"Serverless" isn't a misnomer. It's the movement of management of everything below some API and/or Runtime to outside of your organization. A technology can enable a serverless culture within an organization, but that doesn't mean every deployment of a so-called "serverless" technology is actually serverless. If I write a lambda function, but then my ops team deploys it on a piece of metal running in their closet, its not serverless. Inversely, I can write a traditional stateful NodeJS app and give it to Heroku, and it becomes Serverless. In that sense, Serverless isn't really a quality of the technology, though certain technologies are optimized to be serverless. Its a quality of how its deployed, and more importantly your organizational culture around that. Of course, technologists hate this definition because we can't just call whatever we want Serverless. Moreover, Serverless starts seeming a lot less like the desired end-state we should aim for; often it makes sense to manage your own servers, just like it sometimes makes sense to manage your own hardware. OpenFaaS can totally be serverless. But to qualify, we'd have to be talking about an underlying Kubernetes infrastructure that abstracts the metal and OS away, so something like Fargate or Azure Containers. Certainly not on DigitalOcean. Here's the signal: If I can SSH into something within the stack, it's not Serverless.