4 ms·

On multiple 100k servers? Not as much as you think. Serverless means you have no server. Stop repeating amazons lies. It is nonsense.

• klodolph 3y ago
  “Server” is a long-running process that serves requests. “Serverless” means that your requests are handled by short-lived processes of some kind. This is just the name for it. If you want to poke holes in the definition I gave, it won’t do any good, because definitions are kinda fuzzy and incomplete to begin with. If you try to argue about what “serverless” means, you’re just going to end up drifting away from the consensus about what words mean. Consensus is the only thing that matters here. Consensus generally won’t be universal—I know people that refuse to accept “literally” as an intensifier—but that is a problem we have to deal with.
  • kunley 3y ago
    But he has a point. There is definitely a layer of long-running processes queuing and distributing these requests. In this sense, "serverless" is a buzzword.
    • klodolph 3y ago
      Likewise, every pair of “wireless headphones” have many sets of wires inside them, if you cut them open. “Vegan” products you buy at the store are made by humans, who are a type of animal, so you cannot say that vegan products contain no animal products. Plastic is an animal product because humans make it, and humans are animals. If we go down this road, the only conclusions we get are absurd and useless ones. Language is a consensus process dominated by metaphor and shared context. It is not a mathematical process.
      • lostmsu 3y ago
        Your comment actually made me wonder if there are people who don't eat honey because it is made by bees.
  • angrais 3y ago
    Why are you defining server in that way? Do you have a reference? A server is a physical machine with an operating system. It can run many processes.
    • klodolph 3y ago
      > A server is a physical machine with an operating system. It can run many processes. That is an acceptable and different definition of “server”. Words have multiple definitions, that’s why any time you look something up in the dictionary, you are likely to see multiple entries for the same word. I generally don’t use the word “server” that way. I say “machine” when I am talking about machines, and “server” when I am talking about daemon processes. A great many people I have worked with in the past ten years or so, in multiple parts of the country, have adopted similar terminology to lessen confusion. If you accept that words have multiple definitions, and accept that “server” has multiple definitions, then it is easy to accept that “serverless” means something like “the response is not ultimately processed by a daemon process”. Just like we accept that wireless headphones are called “wireless headphones”, even though they have wires inside. They are only missing one particular set of wires. Like, “the audio is not transmitted to the headphones over a wire” wireless, “the request is ultimately processed by something other than a long-running daemon” serverless. I find these definitions easy to understand, natural to use, and I find that they don’t confuse listeners when I use them. I avoid calling the machine a “server” because it is sometimes confusing, but I’m not going to argue with someone who uses it that way and tell them that they are wrong. That would be horrible.
      • angrais 3y ago
        My point was that I have never heard anyone describe a server or serverless in that way: as simply a process. I agree that thinking about server as a process/Daemon is a great way to frame serverless. I've also not considered that wireless headphones have wires so it's been fun to think about that too.
  • hnburnsy 3y ago
    >“Server” is a long-running process that serves requests. “Serverless” means that your requests are handled by short-lived processes of some kind. Stateless?
• deleted 3y ago
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