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My understanding of serverless = easily scalable, managed service. But somehow the word annoys people. Maybe we should find a better word?

afroboy 7y ago
serverless it mean no server but everything use servers, yep we should find a better expression.
- threatripper 7y ago
  Peer-to-peer networking in its most pure form does not need a dedicated/central server. Each machine hosts a client/server instance locally.
vbezhenar 7y ago
My understanding was that cloud = easily scalable, managed service.
- iampims 7y ago
  That was mine too. It’s possible that this previously applied to primitives (cpu, memory, network, storage) and now refers to applications (keyvalue store, SQL database, message queues, etc.)
rumanator 7y ago
> My understanding of serverless = easily scalable, managed service. There is already a term for that concept: managed services. There is no such thing as a managed service that's designed not to be scalable. Some implementations may be better at scaling than others, but that's it. The serverless buzzword is pure marketing.
- nck4222 7y ago
  On the one hand, the term serverless is really frustrating to me. On the other hand, there's a certain amount of amusement I get from seeing "the cloud" become a marketing buzzword in the mid-late '00's, and now seeing the same thing happen with "serverless." When you look at the implementation of the two "technologies", they're about 95% the same. Yet somehow they're pitched as these big revolutions. In another decade when terminals or p2p become popular again we'll be hearing about some new buzzword like "Terran" computing, or "social" architecture or something.
kubanczyk 7y ago
'Instanceless'. Because the difference is that you outsource and forget any questions about the instance(s) of the service (and whatever supports it, like the os process, the kernel, the vm, the real machine, the datacenter).
danenania 7y ago
For me, serverless is not just "easy" scaling or a managed service, but completely automatic and elastic scaling with metered billing. If you can go from 1 to millions of requests without touching your infrastructure or dropping requests, then that's serverless. If you have to provision larger instances or even wait 10 minutes for your autoscaling policy to spin up new VMs so you can serve those requests, then it's not. Some services labelled serverless really do reach very close to this ideal (S3, for instance), while others fall short in various ways. "Serverless" Aurora, for example, can't scale writes beyond a single instance, so while it can take you quite far (a 96 core db instance can handle a lot of writes), past a certain point it's no longer really serverless anymore since you'll have to figure out some kind of sharding strategy to keep scaling writes. With S3 or DynamoDB, this doesn't happen. While even those services do have some sanity check limitations, they can scale seamlessly up to the point where you start to approach the scale of AWS itself.
- imafish 7y ago
  I agree, yours is definitely a better description.
Geeflow 7y ago
I always explain serverless as "Instead of one server you have countless servers, but they are managed by someone else". Yes, a better word would be great. I think that ship is sailed though...
tracker1 7y ago
I never found things like DBaaS annoying at all.

afroboy 7y ago

serverless it mean no server but everything use servers, yep we should find a better expression.

threatripper 7y ago
Peer-to-peer networking in its most pure form does not need a dedicated/central server. Each machine hosts a client/server instance locally.

vbezhenar 7y ago

My understanding was that cloud = easily scalable, managed service.

iampims 7y ago
That was mine too. It’s possible that this previously applied to primitives (cpu, memory, network, storage) and now refers to applications (keyvalue store, SQL database, message queues, etc.)

rumanator 7y ago

> My understanding of serverless = easily scalable, managed service. There is already a term for that concept: managed services. There is no such thing as a managed service that's designed not to be scalable. Some implementations may be better at scaling than others, but that's it. The serverless buzzword is pure marketing.

nck4222 7y ago
On the one hand, the term serverless is really frustrating to me. On the other hand, there's a certain amount of amusement I get from seeing "the cloud" become a marketing buzzword in the mid-late '00's, and now seeing the same thing happen with "serverless." When you look at the implementation of the two "technologies", they're about 95% the same. Yet somehow they're pitched as these big revolutions. In another decade when terminals or p2p become popular again we'll be hearing about some new buzzword like "Terran" computing, or "social" architecture or something.

kubanczyk 7y ago

'Instanceless'. Because the difference is that you outsource and forget any questions about the instance(s) of the service (and whatever supports it, like the os process, the kernel, the vm, the real machine, the datacenter).

danenania 7y ago

For me, serverless is not just "easy" scaling or a managed service, but completely automatic and elastic scaling with metered billing. If you can go from 1 to millions of requests without touching your infrastructure or dropping requests, then that's serverless. If you have to provision larger instances or even wait 10 minutes for your autoscaling policy to spin up new VMs so you can serve those requests, then it's not. Some services labelled serverless really do reach very close to this ideal (S3, for instance), while others fall short in various ways. "Serverless" Aurora, for example, can't scale writes beyond a single instance, so while it can take you quite far (a 96 core db instance can handle a lot of writes), past a certain point it's no longer really serverless anymore since you'll have to figure out some kind of sharding strategy to keep scaling writes. With S3 or DynamoDB, this doesn't happen. While even those services do have some sanity check limitations, they can scale seamlessly up to the point where you start to approach the scale of AWS itself.

imafish 7y ago
I agree, yours is definitely a better description.

Geeflow 7y ago

I always explain serverless as "Instead of one server you have countless servers, but they are managed by someone else". Yes, a better word would be great. I think that ship is sailed though...

tracker1 7y ago

I never found things like DBaaS annoying at all.