5 ms·

Great to see some new entrants on the IaaS market! Marketing feedback; for me, using the word "serverless" in this context for me is a huge turnoff. It signals

Great to see some new entrants on the IaaS market! Marketing feedback; for me, using the word "serverless" in this context for me is a huge turnoff. It signals either lack of understanding or knowing fully well that it's a misnomer and can easily to be interpreted as being something else than what it is. Especially as a headline or tagline. It's a buzzword that was dead right around the time when it was hot. Just my 5c.

jedberg 6y ago
Serverless is just the term people use to mean "you don't manage the servers". It's pretty well established and I don't think it's going away.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  It arguably has a more specific definition, like "you only interact with it on a per-invocation level" or maybe "you don't manage the servers or the runtime environment". With other systems that are not considered Serverless (like Heroku or Kubernetes) it can also be true that you don't manage the servers.
  - Legogris 6y ago
    "Fully managed", "pay-as-you-go (PAYG)". This is the language used by AWS to market their services such as Lambda, for example, and IMO is a lot clearer.
- Legogris 6y ago
  There is a better word for that: "Managed".
paulgb 6y ago
I've seen distaste for the word "serverless" emerge a few times on HN and I really don't get it. Is it just excessive literalism? Of course I know that there are servers somewhere, the selling point of serverless is that as the user I generally don't have to think about them. My wireless vacuum presumably has wires in it, but I don't find that to be false advertising. The point is that the wires (and servers) don't get in my way :)
- Legogris 6y ago
  I do appreciate the "wireless" analogy, however even if you did have a vacuum cleaner without any internal wires at all, it wouldn't really make any difference for you as a user. Whereas there is such a thing as fully peer-to-peer systems without actual servers. It's almost as if the people who coined and marketed the term want to consolidate the idea that servers/backends are an inherent property of information systems. It should be said that I am a both a believer in that the words we use shape they way we conceptualize and reason about things, and also a proponent for less infrastructure centralization. Now you might say, "we already have the word peer-to-peer with that meaning". IMO peer-to-peer has been diluted to the point of being practically meaningless, commonly used to describe systems such as Google Hangouts. I don't believe there is any kind of conspiracy or conscious effort on the side of vendors or providers to do this, but effectively we don't have a word to describe fully decentralized/distributed/peer-to-peer/serverless software today because all those words have either been diluted or have a different meaning. It gives me some 1984 doublespeak vibes. Besides all the above: My original comment was meant as honest advice that they should reconsider using the term this way, given both that: * I'm not the only one who feel this way, so it will likely put off other potential customers as well * There is disagreement on what the term should mean even as commonly used (just look at other comments here arguing that nothing with state between invocations can be considered "serverless") I think the intended meaning will come across much clearer by instead calling it "Fully managed Redis" or, if it's crucial to get across the billing model, "Fully managed, pay-as-you go Redis".

jedberg 6y ago

Serverless is just the term people use to mean "you don't manage the servers". It's pretty well established and I don't think it's going away.

cactus2093 6y ago
It arguably has a more specific definition, like "you only interact with it on a per-invocation level" or maybe "you don't manage the servers or the runtime environment". With other systems that are not considered Serverless (like Heroku or Kubernetes) it can also be true that you don't manage the servers.
- Legogris 6y ago
  "Fully managed", "pay-as-you-go (PAYG)". This is the language used by AWS to market their services such as Lambda, for example, and IMO is a lot clearer.
Legogris 6y ago
There is a better word for that: "Managed".

paulgb 6y ago

I've seen distaste for the word "serverless" emerge a few times on HN and I really don't get it. Is it just excessive literalism? Of course I know that there are servers somewhere, the selling point of serverless is that as the user I generally don't have to think about them. My wireless vacuum presumably has wires in it, but I don't find that to be false advertising. The point is that the wires (and servers) don't get in my way :)

Legogris 6y ago
I do appreciate the "wireless" analogy, however even if you did have a vacuum cleaner without any internal wires at all, it wouldn't really make any difference for you as a user. Whereas there is such a thing as fully peer-to-peer systems without actual servers. It's almost as if the people who coined and marketed the term want to consolidate the idea that servers/backends are an inherent property of information systems. It should be said that I am a both a believer in that the words we use shape they way we conceptualize and reason about things, and also a proponent for less infrastructure centralization. Now you might say, "we already have the word peer-to-peer with that meaning". IMO peer-to-peer has been diluted to the point of being practically meaningless, commonly used to describe systems such as Google Hangouts. I don't believe there is any kind of conspiracy or conscious effort on the side of vendors or providers to do this, but effectively we don't have a word to describe fully decentralized/distributed/peer-to-peer/serverless software today because all those words have either been diluted or have a different meaning. It gives me some 1984 doublespeak vibes. Besides all the above: My original comment was meant as honest advice that they should reconsider using the term this way, given both that: * I'm not the only one who feel this way, so it will likely put off other potential customers as well * There is disagreement on what the term should mean even as commonly used (just look at other comments here arguing that nothing with state between invocations can be considered "serverless") I think the intended meaning will come across much clearer by instead calling it "Fully managed Redis" or, if it's crucial to get across the billing model, "Fully managed, pay-as-you go Redis".