3 ms·

>I'm kind of traditional: "Cloud" still means "just another person's hard drive", and "serverless" means "just another person's computer" for me. I agree for t

by tmh88j 7y ago

>I'm kind of traditional: "Cloud" still means "just another person's hard drive", and "serverless" means "just another person's computer" for me. I agree for the most part on cloud, but isn't "another person's computer" just a server? Serverless is more like a service running on a server that requires zero configuration or maintenance for you, just add your code and it works. Typically that means no messing with apache, nginx, no language nor framework setup/configuration, etc...

jbverschoor 7y ago
Simply moving that towards the developer who must adhere to the available "serverless" servers + configurationscreens. J2EE re-invented.
- tmh88j 7y ago
  I don't understand, are you disagreeing with what I've said or just saying we've had the concept of serverless for a while?
MonaroVXR 7y ago
> Serverless is more like a service running on a server that requires zero configuration or maintenance for you, just add your code and it works. Typically that means no messing with apache, nginx, no language nor framework setup/configuration, etc... Whoa, I thought it was: Use a server, use a CDN, shutdown the server and its running serverless. Because everything is getting hitting the CDN and not the actual server.
- tmh88j 7y ago
  I'm not sure what purpose of the server is at the start in that example, but sure, that's a common serverless architecture. S3 has an option to host static websites. You can upload HTML/JS to an S3 bucket and it will serve the content. Unless the site is truly static, the JS will be making requests to other servers/services/APIs. Obviously it's on a server, but the "serverless" part comes from not having to provision and manage a server. You can put your code a a service and allow those services (S3, Lambda, API Gateway, etc...) to do the "server" work for you. Serverless is kind of a generic term. I guess hosting sites like GoDaddy that allow you drag and drop some PHP, HTML and JS files into a CPanel type interface are technically serverless, since you're not managing a server. Put some code up there and let their platform run it for you.
  - MonaroVXR 7y ago
    I genuinely don't understand this. You can use Jenkins with Kubernetes or Openshift to do this right?
    - tmh88j 7y ago
      Serverless is just a buzzword for a service that you'd typically have to operate your own server for, but the service completely removes the need for that so you can focus solely on that (usually) one task. It also goes hand in hand with microservices, you'll see those two used together a lot because microserves are often built using serverless services. You can make it as complex or as simple as you like. Your entire application doesn't have to be serverless, you can have even just a single small piece of it running serverless. For example, going back to a serverless frontend using S3 that I mentioned before. You can host a JavaScript SPA on S3 and use a service like Route 53 for DNS. Your JavaScript can then make API calls to a full-on server that you manage, say an EC2 instance with a LAMP stack or even Azure with C#/.NET. Your front end is serverless because it's just hosted on S3 and you're not maintaining a server, but your backend code would be deployed and served however you like, such as Jenkins and Kubernetes like you mentioned. AWS lambda is a good intro to the world of serverless computing if you're not familiar with it. While you can write code on your computer and use the AWS CLI to upload it, the AWS console even has a text editor that resembles JS Fiddle. It can receive events from other AWS services and you can write JavaScript, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, Go and PowerShell to process those events and do whatever you like, such as writing a DB record or adding something to an SQS queue. The point is you're writing real production code that does not live on a server you manage.

by tmh88j 7y ago

jbverschoor 7y ago

Simply moving that towards the developer who must adhere to the available "serverless" servers + configurationscreens. J2EE re-invented.

tmh88j 7y ago
I don't understand, are you disagreeing with what I've said or just saying we've had the concept of serverless for a while?

MonaroVXR 7y ago

> Serverless is more like a service running on a server that requires zero configuration or maintenance for you, just add your code and it works. Typically that means no messing with apache, nginx, no language nor framework setup/configuration, etc... Whoa, I thought it was: Use a server, use a CDN, shutdown the server and its running serverless. Because everything is getting hitting the CDN and not the actual server.

tmh88j 7y ago
I'm not sure what purpose of the server is at the start in that example, but sure, that's a common serverless architecture. S3 has an option to host static websites. You can upload HTML/JS to an S3 bucket and it will serve the content. Unless the site is truly static, the JS will be making requests to other servers/services/APIs. Obviously it's on a server, but the "serverless" part comes from not having to provision and manage a server. You can put your code a a service and allow those services (S3, Lambda, API Gateway, etc...) to do the "server" work for you. Serverless is kind of a generic term. I guess hosting sites like GoDaddy that allow you drag and drop some PHP, HTML and JS files into a CPanel type interface are technically serverless, since you're not managing a server. Put some code up there and let their platform run it for you.
- MonaroVXR 7y ago
  I genuinely don't understand this. You can use Jenkins with Kubernetes or Openshift to do this right?
  - tmh88j 7y ago
    Serverless is just a buzzword for a service that you'd typically have to operate your own server for, but the service completely removes the need for that so you can focus solely on that (usually) one task. It also goes hand in hand with microservices, you'll see those two used together a lot because microserves are often built using serverless services. You can make it as complex or as simple as you like. Your entire application doesn't have to be serverless, you can have even just a single small piece of it running serverless. For example, going back to a serverless frontend using S3 that I mentioned before. You can host a JavaScript SPA on S3 and use a service like Route 53 for DNS. Your JavaScript can then make API calls to a full-on server that you manage, say an EC2 instance with a LAMP stack or even Azure with C#/.NET. Your front end is serverless because it's just hosted on S3 and you're not maintaining a server, but your backend code would be deployed and served however you like, such as Jenkins and Kubernetes like you mentioned. AWS lambda is a good intro to the world of serverless computing if you're not familiar with it. While you can write code on your computer and use the AWS CLI to upload it, the AWS console even has a text editor that resembles JS Fiddle. It can receive events from other AWS services and you can write JavaScript, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, Go and PowerShell to process those events and do whatever you like, such as writing a DB record or adding something to an SQS queue. The point is you're writing real production code that does not live on a server you manage.