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A serverless server? It is a great illustration of how the term "serverless" has shifted from literally no server (ex: sqlite database) to "somebody else's com

by GuB-42 6y ago

A serverless server? It is a great illustration of how the term "serverless" has shifted from literally no server (ex: sqlite database) to "somebody else's computer".

thehappypm 6y ago
"Serverless" is a ridiculous stupid term. You'd think it meant something like Photoshop, some system that doesn't rely a server, something that lives locally. Nope. It's just a server that someone else manages 90% of.
- specialp 6y ago
  No we call those a more succinct term: local processes. We call "serverless" for processes running not locally that do not require standing up a server that you care about for, are billed by usage only ($0 for none, infinity for infinite), and you are not concerned where or how it is running. Are there computers listening for requests somewhere that someone is managing that is doing this? Yes. But from my frame of reference it is a service, not a server. I know a lot of people on here get hung up on it, but it is the term and it is not going to go away.
bambam24 6y ago
Google serverless to start learning about it
ionwake 6y ago
I literally had one of the heads of a crucial flight system project loudly exclaim to me in front of the senior managers. "It's serverless - there is no server!" To which I honestly, just kept my mouth shut and stood aside.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  To which I honestly, just kept my mouth shut and stood aside. I can never keep my mouth shut in these situations. Sometimes it leads to promotions, but I suspect it puts a ceiling on how high I can climb the corporate ladder.
  - ionwake 6y ago
    I just figured there was some "short term" misunderstanding. As always I looked like an idiot but hey in a good place with good people youll all just move onto the next topic and know the details will work themselves out regardless who is right.
  - ncphil 6y ago
    Spent the first 10 years of my IT career driving towards greater control over the systems we managed, because "the reason the service is down is that someone else (usually a vendor) didn't do their job" was never an excuse. The last 5-10 years I've found myself ceding more and more control to cloud service vendors (like Microsoft). Less work for me ("raise a premium case"). Less stress too ("they're working on it, nothing for us to do"). Now I finding myself hoping I'll be retired before the pendulum swings back again.
    - kazen44 6y ago
      everything old is new again. cloud computing is basically batch processing in the mainframe of yesterday from a functional standpoint.
- navaati 6y ago
  Maybe what he meant is "there is no server that we are responsible for", which is where the benefit lie for them. (not commenting on the "serverless" name for what used to be called "mutualised services"…)
redwall_hp 6y ago
My understanding of it has been "look, I reinvented cgi-bin."
- oblio 6y ago
  Is cgi-bin highly available and will someone else have to wake up at night if it crashes?
  - jamespo 6y ago
    sure, cgi-bin with a big load balancer
  - falcolas 6y ago
    It can be, and not necessarily. `cgi-bin` can be as stateless as you want it to be. Just as stateless as lambdas, or other forms of "serverless" functions. And thus, it can be distributed as well as any other stateless function.
  - fooblat 6y ago
    Yes and no, respectively. A cgi-bin is as highly available as the web infrastructure hosting it, which as the cgi-bin author you don't need to know anything about. A cgi-bin cannot "crash" because there is nothing long-running to crash. It is only run on demand. I think it is easy to make the case that CGI was the proto-serverless api and that the serverless offerings we have today are an evolution of the CGI approach. edit: typos
    - mprovost 6y ago
      And cgi-bin was really just an evolution of inetd (or ucspi-tcp if you worshipped at the altar of djb). You didn't used to have to worry about binding to ports or long running processes. Something would just send you a message on stdin and you replied on stdout.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    I ran an e-mail service with 2m users. The web frontend was written in C++ (no, I don't want to go back, but we had a pretty nice custom framework) all served up as a CGI, behind a load balancer. If our code crashed, the next request would just get served as normal. If Apache crashed or a frontend crashed, another one would just take its place. High availability cgi-bin is trivial.
xtracto 6y ago
I was doing serverless pages back in late 90s when I uploaded PHP scripts to "website providers".
- themarkers 6y ago
  true serverless
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    Why "true"? I don't have to worry about servers and infrastructure with Lambdas either.
- fxleach 6y ago
  Now those are called "cloud" servers (gasps, awe)...
  - fxleach 6y ago
    Why are you booing me? I'm right.
- adrianpike 6y ago
  original lambda
  - intergalplan 6y ago
    "Your function runs from scratch on each request, with some intelligent caching for performance reasons." Gestures at LAMP and PHP-FPM
- benbristow 6y ago
  Different thing though. When you uploaded your PHP script, you uploaded it to a single server, and it ran on a single server. Unless your provider were doing some kind of load balancing (doubt it). With serverless you upload your 'script' to the 'cloud' and then it will run on any number of servers, usually assigned to one when it dry-runs. Then it'll unload from the server afterwards. And therefore unless you have a bottleneck (like a database server) then you can essentially scale as far as the cloud will let you.
throwaway894345 6y ago
> serverless server? This isn’t a contradiction. “Server” is an overloaded term and the “server” in “serverless” refers to a different meaning of “server” than the “email server” bit. “Serverless” means there is no physical or virtual hosts to manage, you just supply the request handler i.e., the email server. It's amusing because it sounds like a contradiction, but it's not one.
- darkwater 6y ago
  > This isn’t a contradiction. Yes it is. The "server" in "serverless" means no need to low-level manage/provision a server (computer) and its lifecycle. While "server" in "A serverless email server" means actually "service" as in "A serverless email service on AWS using S3 and SES". Which makes much more sense. The linked repo lets you have an "email server" just like GSuite gives you a "serverless email server".
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I don't understand. You insist it's a contradiction but then go on to reiterate my own argument which demonstrates that it is not, in fact, a contradiction but rather using the same term ("server") to refer to two distinct concepts ("computer" vs "service")?
    - darkwater 6y ago
      It's a contradiction because it's an incorrect overload of the word "server".
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        Well, Oxford English Dictionary disagrees with you.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  So if you get an omelette at a restaurant, I can call it an eggless omelette because I didn’t have to cook the eggs myself?
diveanon 6y ago
This comment shows up on every thread about lambdas, and despite the FUD it still proves its value to me every single day.
hutrdvnj 6y ago
I guess a Heroku hosted application counts as serverless then.
EGreg 6y ago
Serverless has become a stupid marketing term, just like Facebook hijacked the words “Friend” and “Like”. I look forward to true serverless software - that is either peer to peer or uses a distributed back-end with encryption. Now THAT is the future! Serverless just means “we spin up a server for you”, similarly to how “the cloud” is just a euphemism for “extreme centralization of hosting myriad clients under the control of one company”.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Serverless just means “we spin up a server for you” Thank you for "spin up a server," as in fire up the hard drives, rather than "stand up a server," as in... I dunno.
- smolder 6y ago
  It's more than that, slightly. A "serverless" application doesn't have a specific piece of hardware supporting it except in the context of a single operation. The hardware is all abstracted away and allocated from a pool on demand. I suppose it comes from "serverless architecture", where there are just other distributed services (not specific servers, virtual or otherwise) executing your code. I agree it's not a term well suited to its popular use, but such is life. Commercial interests are constantly mucking up the language to suit their own ends. E.g. Discord is abusing the term "server" to mean a virtual meeting space. "Organic" w.r.t. food has a really contrived official criteria, unlike in chemistry. Regular people muck up the language in frustrating ways, too. See "literally".
libria 6y ago
We went through this when people first started calling quadcopters "drones". It's just a term used to describe a server configuration that has different billing/operational characteristics than traditional always-on. And like the quadcopter-drone, I hope everyone losing their shit over this can either accept "serverless" or submit and market a new term that conveys this difference soon.
throwaway667555 6y ago
This argument is so tiring... if we all agreed to change the word “serverless” to idk “xirverous” it would have a pretty clear meaning and clear distinctions from “server” and “local to the machine”. Xirverous technologies are an innovative, new, unique, and interrelated class of technologies. Thank you for your consideration.
barbazoo 6y ago
And a million other moving parts: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-email/assets/diagram.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...

by GuB-42 6y ago

A serverless server? It is a great illustration of how the term "serverless" has shifted from literally no server (ex: sqlite database) to "somebody else's computer".

thehappypm 6y ago

"Serverless" is a ridiculous stupid term. You'd think it meant something like Photoshop, some system that doesn't rely a server, something that lives locally. Nope. It's just a server that someone else manages 90% of.

specialp 6y ago
No we call those a more succinct term: local processes. We call "serverless" for processes running not locally that do not require standing up a server that you care about for, are billed by usage only ($0 for none, infinity for infinite), and you are not concerned where or how it is running. Are there computers listening for requests somewhere that someone is managing that is doing this? Yes. But from my frame of reference it is a service, not a server. I know a lot of people on here get hung up on it, but it is the term and it is not going to go away.

bambam24 6y ago

Google serverless to start learning about it

ionwake 6y ago

I literally had one of the heads of a crucial flight system project loudly exclaim to me in front of the senior managers. "It's serverless - there is no server!" To which I honestly, just kept my mouth shut and stood aside.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago
To which I honestly, just kept my mouth shut and stood aside. I can never keep my mouth shut in these situations. Sometimes it leads to promotions, but I suspect it puts a ceiling on how high I can climb the corporate ladder.
- ionwake 6y ago
  I just figured there was some "short term" misunderstanding. As always I looked like an idiot but hey in a good place with good people youll all just move onto the next topic and know the details will work themselves out regardless who is right.
- ncphil 6y ago
  Spent the first 10 years of my IT career driving towards greater control over the systems we managed, because "the reason the service is down is that someone else (usually a vendor) didn't do their job" was never an excuse. The last 5-10 years I've found myself ceding more and more control to cloud service vendors (like Microsoft). Less work for me ("raise a premium case"). Less stress too ("they're working on it, nothing for us to do"). Now I finding myself hoping I'll be retired before the pendulum swings back again.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    everything old is new again. cloud computing is basically batch processing in the mainframe of yesterday from a functional standpoint.
navaati 6y ago
Maybe what he meant is "there is no server that we are responsible for", which is where the benefit lie for them. (not commenting on the "serverless" name for what used to be called "mutualised services"…)

redwall_hp 6y ago

My understanding of it has been "look, I reinvented cgi-bin."

oblio 6y ago
Is cgi-bin highly available and will someone else have to wake up at night if it crashes?
- jamespo 6y ago
  sure, cgi-bin with a big load balancer
- falcolas 6y ago
  It can be, and not necessarily. `cgi-bin` can be as stateless as you want it to be. Just as stateless as lambdas, or other forms of "serverless" functions. And thus, it can be distributed as well as any other stateless function.
- fooblat 6y ago
  Yes and no, respectively. A cgi-bin is as highly available as the web infrastructure hosting it, which as the cgi-bin author you don't need to know anything about. A cgi-bin cannot "crash" because there is nothing long-running to crash. It is only run on demand. I think it is easy to make the case that CGI was the proto-serverless api and that the serverless offerings we have today are an evolution of the CGI approach. edit: typos
  - mprovost 6y ago
    And cgi-bin was really just an evolution of inetd (or ucspi-tcp if you worshipped at the altar of djb). You didn't used to have to worry about binding to ports or long running processes. Something would just send you a message on stdin and you replied on stdout.
- vidarh 6y ago
  I ran an e-mail service with 2m users. The web frontend was written in C++ (no, I don't want to go back, but we had a pretty nice custom framework) all served up as a CGI, behind a load balancer. If our code crashed, the next request would just get served as normal. If Apache crashed or a frontend crashed, another one would just take its place. High availability cgi-bin is trivial.

xtracto 6y ago

I was doing serverless pages back in late 90s when I uploaded PHP scripts to "website providers".

themarkers 6y ago
true serverless
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  Why "true"? I don't have to worry about servers and infrastructure with Lambdas either.
fxleach 6y ago
Now those are called "cloud" servers (gasps, awe)...
- fxleach 6y ago
  Why are you booing me? I'm right.
adrianpike 6y ago
original lambda
- intergalplan 6y ago
  "Your function runs from scratch on each request, with some intelligent caching for performance reasons." Gestures at LAMP and PHP-FPM
benbristow 6y ago
Different thing though. When you uploaded your PHP script, you uploaded it to a single server, and it ran on a single server. Unless your provider were doing some kind of load balancing (doubt it). With serverless you upload your 'script' to the 'cloud' and then it will run on any number of servers, usually assigned to one when it dry-runs. Then it'll unload from the server afterwards. And therefore unless you have a bottleneck (like a database server) then you can essentially scale as far as the cloud will let you.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> serverless server? This isn’t a contradiction. “Server” is an overloaded term and the “server” in “serverless” refers to a different meaning of “server” than the “email server” bit. “Serverless” means there is no physical or virtual hosts to manage, you just supply the request handler i.e., the email server. It's amusing because it sounds like a contradiction, but it's not one.

darkwater 6y ago
> This isn’t a contradiction. Yes it is. The "server" in "serverless" means no need to low-level manage/provision a server (computer) and its lifecycle. While "server" in "A serverless email server" means actually "service" as in "A serverless email service on AWS using S3 and SES". Which makes much more sense. The linked repo lets you have an "email server" just like GSuite gives you a "serverless email server".
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I don't understand. You insist it's a contradiction but then go on to reiterate my own argument which demonstrates that it is not, in fact, a contradiction but rather using the same term ("server") to refer to two distinct concepts ("computer" vs "service")?
  - darkwater 6y ago
    It's a contradiction because it's an incorrect overload of the word "server".
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Well, Oxford English Dictionary disagrees with you.
cortesoft 6y ago
So if you get an omelette at a restaurant, I can call it an eggless omelette because I didn’t have to cook the eggs myself?

diveanon 6y ago

This comment shows up on every thread about lambdas, and despite the FUD it still proves its value to me every single day.

hutrdvnj 6y ago

I guess a Heroku hosted application counts as serverless then.

EGreg 6y ago

Serverless has become a stupid marketing term, just like Facebook hijacked the words “Friend” and “Like”. I look forward to true serverless software - that is either peer to peer or uses a distributed back-end with encryption. Now THAT is the future! Serverless just means “we spin up a server for you”, similarly to how “the cloud” is just a euphemism for “extreme centralization of hosting myriad clients under the control of one company”.

reaperducer 6y ago
Serverless just means “we spin up a server for you” Thank you for "spin up a server," as in fire up the hard drives, rather than "stand up a server," as in... I dunno.
smolder 6y ago
It's more than that, slightly. A "serverless" application doesn't have a specific piece of hardware supporting it except in the context of a single operation. The hardware is all abstracted away and allocated from a pool on demand. I suppose it comes from "serverless architecture", where there are just other distributed services (not specific servers, virtual or otherwise) executing your code. I agree it's not a term well suited to its popular use, but such is life. Commercial interests are constantly mucking up the language to suit their own ends. E.g. Discord is abusing the term "server" to mean a virtual meeting space. "Organic" w.r.t. food has a really contrived official criteria, unlike in chemistry. Regular people muck up the language in frustrating ways, too. See "literally".

libria 6y ago

We went through this when people first started calling quadcopters "drones". It's just a term used to describe a server configuration that has different billing/operational characteristics than traditional always-on. And like the quadcopter-drone, I hope everyone losing their shit over this can either accept "serverless" or submit and market a new term that conveys this difference soon.

throwaway667555 6y ago

This argument is so tiring... if we all agreed to change the word “serverless” to idk “xirverous” it would have a pretty clear meaning and clear distinctions from “server” and “local to the machine”. Xirverous technologies are an innovative, new, unique, and interrelated class of technologies. Thank you for your consideration.

barbazoo 6y ago

And a million other moving parts: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-email/assets/diagram.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...