6 ms·

Please stop this abuse of language. Here's serverless sqlite: https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html

dandanua 4y ago
Modern marketing makes me mad sometimes. They call something "serverless" while in fact it runs on their servers somewhere in the world, where you have even less control than on your cloud. Though, I believe it was popularized by Amazon, which doesn't care much about being honest in its expansionism.
jjeaff 4y ago
From your link: Classic Serverless: The database engine runs within the same process, thread, and address space as the application. There is no message passing or network activity. Neo-Serverless: The database engine runs in a separate namespace from the application, probably on a separate machine, but the database is provided as a turn-key service by the hosting provider, requires no management or administration by the application owners, and is so easy to use that the developers can think of the database as being serverless even if it really does use a server under the covers. It sounds like this is neo-serverless but serverless nonetheless.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  It “is” in the generous sense that the quoted section interprets generously for the purpose of interpreting it generously.
infogulch 4y ago
This ship is so sailed already that the stories of its voyages are legendary classics that were told to our great grandparents.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > This ship is so sailed already that the stories of its voyages are legendary classics that were told to our great grandparents. Specifically, the term is 10 years old this October: http://readwrite.com/2012/10/15/why-the-future-of-software-and-apps-is-serverless/ http://readwrite.com/2012/10/15/why-the-future-of-software-a... It has never, ever meant that the software wasn't running on a server. From TFA: "The phrase 'serverless' doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It simply means that developers no longer have to think that much about them. Computing resources get used as services without having to manage around physical capacities or limits."
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  Ah, the captainless ship (where the captain is behind a locked door).
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  It’s a tale so old that “server” lost meaning before we could even be in a state of “serverless”ness. First there was a cloud, and then there was no clarity of what conditions a process even runs under. And it wasn’t good, but it became stable. And on the next day, there were databases from on high, as if they’d spontaneously burned a bush.
derefr 4y ago
People don't say "serverless" to mean "there are no servers involved." They say "serverless" to mean that the data architecture is such that: 1. scaling does not require thinking about servers; and 2. you don't have to pay for committed capacity measured in servers.
- hestefisk 4y ago
  Then why not call it “scalable”, “elastic”? All these neologisms are tiring.
  - derefr 4y ago
    The other key feature of "serverless" is that the store-of-record for a "serverless" system isn't a part of the running system — i.e. the system's state doesn't live on any particular server / cluster that is run as part of the operations of the system. Instead, a "serverless" system's store-of-record is some external and semantically-abstracted storage system — e.g. "a remote git repository" (GitOps); "an object-storage bucket" (Snowflake); "a document store" (Lambda); "a blockchain"; etc. Where all that's important about this storage system is its API, such that the design is portable to any backing storage service that supports the same API. This means that, in serverless systems, the mutable state in the cluster is just an ephemeral cache representation of the externally-managed data-at-rest. Another way to think about this is by thinking of "a server" as a thing with durable state that you have to worry about — e.g. protect from disk corruption, make backups of, etc; vs. something like "an ephemeral immutable-infrastructure container workload" that can die and be recreated with no problems. Serverless systems are systems without any "servers" in this sense — nothing to back up; nothing to disaster-recover; etc. Nobody operating these systems ever needs to think about individual servers. Nobody ever needs to SSH into a server, upgrade a server, restart a server, etc. The operations for such systems can be handled entirely at the "cluster" and "ephemeral workload" levels. Nodes within the cluster that "go bad" can simply be drained and deleted — this may even be automated. And further, because of this lack of local durable state, there's no need to worry about "allocating" that state, and thereby allocating customers to particular clusters. Serverless compute clusters are usually just one huge cluster (per region), where customers' individual request workloads just get scheduled onto that cluster wherever they'll fit. Of course, the external store-of-record for a serverless system must have "servers" — the data-at-rest ultimately has to reside durably on some disk somewhere. But 1. they're not your servers, and their ops problems are not your ops problems; and 2. because they're a much lower-level abstraction, they can scaled much more robustly, and so can have far fewer operational problems in the first place; and 3. because they're a much lower-level abstraction, they benefit from economies-of-scale in shared tenancy in ways domain-specific compute/DBMS/etc. clusters usually don't; and so your system can benefit from a storage layer that's hyperscaled + hyper-robust from serving millions of tenants' low-level needs.
tomatowurst 4y ago
you are really nitpicking and taking offense over something you made up in your head. The context of serverless has changed to mean cloud offering.
tuukkah 4y ago
Don't say server-"less" if you mean in-process (which may well run on a server). Here's Sqlite without a server, running in the client and backed by static file hosting: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-databases-on-github-pages/ https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...

dandanua 4y ago

Modern marketing makes me mad sometimes. They call something "serverless" while in fact it runs on their servers somewhere in the world, where you have even less control than on your cloud. Though, I believe it was popularized by Amazon, which doesn't care much about being honest in its expansionism.

jjeaff 4y ago

From your link: Classic Serverless: The database engine runs within the same process, thread, and address space as the application. There is no message passing or network activity. Neo-Serverless: The database engine runs in a separate namespace from the application, probably on a separate machine, but the database is provided as a turn-key service by the hosting provider, requires no management or administration by the application owners, and is so easy to use that the developers can think of the database as being serverless even if it really does use a server under the covers. It sounds like this is neo-serverless but serverless nonetheless.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
It “is” in the generous sense that the quoted section interprets generously for the purpose of interpreting it generously.

infogulch 4y ago

This ship is so sailed already that the stories of its voyages are legendary classics that were told to our great grandparents.

CharlesW 4y ago
> This ship is so sailed already that the stories of its voyages are legendary classics that were told to our great grandparents. Specifically, the term is 10 years old this October: http://readwrite.com/2012/10/15/why-the-future-of-software-and-apps-is-serverless/ http://readwrite.com/2012/10/15/why-the-future-of-software-a... It has never, ever meant that the software wasn't running on a server. From TFA: "The phrase 'serverless' doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It simply means that developers no longer have to think that much about them. Computing resources get used as services without having to manage around physical capacities or limits."
ahartmetz 4y ago
Ah, the captainless ship (where the captain is behind a locked door).
eyelidlessness 4y ago
It’s a tale so old that “server” lost meaning before we could even be in a state of “serverless”ness. First there was a cloud, and then there was no clarity of what conditions a process even runs under. And it wasn’t good, but it became stable. And on the next day, there were databases from on high, as if they’d spontaneously burned a bush.

derefr 4y ago

People don't say "serverless" to mean "there are no servers involved." They say "serverless" to mean that the data architecture is such that: 1. scaling does not require thinking about servers; and 2. you don't have to pay for committed capacity measured in servers.

hestefisk 4y ago
Then why not call it “scalable”, “elastic”? All these neologisms are tiring.
- derefr 4y ago
  The other key feature of "serverless" is that the store-of-record for a "serverless" system isn't a part of the running system — i.e. the system's state doesn't live on any particular server / cluster that is run as part of the operations of the system. Instead, a "serverless" system's store-of-record is some external and semantically-abstracted storage system — e.g. "a remote git repository" (GitOps); "an object-storage bucket" (Snowflake); "a document store" (Lambda); "a blockchain"; etc. Where all that's important about this storage system is its API, such that the design is portable to any backing storage service that supports the same API. This means that, in serverless systems, the mutable state in the cluster is just an ephemeral cache representation of the externally-managed data-at-rest. Another way to think about this is by thinking of "a server" as a thing with durable state that you have to worry about — e.g. protect from disk corruption, make backups of, etc; vs. something like "an ephemeral immutable-infrastructure container workload" that can die and be recreated with no problems. Serverless systems are systems without any "servers" in this sense — nothing to back up; nothing to disaster-recover; etc. Nobody operating these systems ever needs to think about individual servers. Nobody ever needs to SSH into a server, upgrade a server, restart a server, etc. The operations for such systems can be handled entirely at the "cluster" and "ephemeral workload" levels. Nodes within the cluster that "go bad" can simply be drained and deleted — this may even be automated. And further, because of this lack of local durable state, there's no need to worry about "allocating" that state, and thereby allocating customers to particular clusters. Serverless compute clusters are usually just one huge cluster (per region), where customers' individual request workloads just get scheduled onto that cluster wherever they'll fit. Of course, the external store-of-record for a serverless system must have "servers" — the data-at-rest ultimately has to reside durably on some disk somewhere. But 1. they're not your servers, and their ops problems are not your ops problems; and 2. because they're a much lower-level abstraction, they can scaled much more robustly, and so can have far fewer operational problems in the first place; and 3. because they're a much lower-level abstraction, they benefit from economies-of-scale in shared tenancy in ways domain-specific compute/DBMS/etc. clusters usually don't; and so your system can benefit from a storage layer that's hyperscaled + hyper-robust from serving millions of tenants' low-level needs.

tomatowurst 4y ago

you are really nitpicking and taking offense over something you made up in your head. The context of serverless has changed to mean cloud offering.

tuukkah 4y ago

Don't say server-"less" if you mean in-process (which may well run on a server). Here's Sqlite without a server, running in the client and backed by static file hosting: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-databases-on-github-pages/ https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...