3 ms·

Can someone explain what this is for someone who doesn't know what Heroku is, and why it's called serverless when it clearly requires a server?

notatoad 2y ago
heroku is (was?) a platform for hosting web apps with a lot of nice ergonomics, to let you run commands like "heroku up" to get your app running on the web with minimal fuss. this appears to be a project to give you the niceities of a PAAS, without actually providing the platform.
- dangus 2y ago
  Heroku still exists, it just sucks. Owned by Salesforce.
  - mega-tux 2y ago
    Heroku is still good for tons of stuff. After Salesforce bought it, it stopped getting much better, they removed part of free quota, some add-ons disappeared, and the like. For example, http2 support just went beta on may. It's a shame.
bulatb 2y ago
"Serverless" means there's no stateful application server in your architecture. No instance, just callable code. Shell script, not daemon. You write narrow business-level functions that take inputs, do their business, and give you the output. They're called, they run, they terminate and carry nothing forward. You deploy them to a hosting platform which will handle making them available, routing requests, and all the other stuff that's incidental to doing the work. The only thing that's your concern is the logic that turns inputs into outputs. At least that's the pitch. Technically a PHP script that you run as CGI through Nginx is "serverless" that way, though of course it's hosted with a software server running on a hardware server. It's serverless because you write a PHP script and it doesn't care what runs it or what's going on around it. It doesn't need to work within the context of an application server like an endpoint in a Django or a Rails app would. Someone else could own a bunch of servers running Nginx, you'd give them prettyprint.php, and it would pretty-print your JSON or whatever at the URL they'd give you. Services that do this are called serverless platforms. The hosting model is called "functions as a service" (FaaS). If you like the architecture but you don't want FaaS from Amazon, Heroku, or some other third party, you can host yourself a mini FaaS with something like Dokku.

notatoad 2y ago

heroku is (was?) a platform for hosting web apps with a lot of nice ergonomics, to let you run commands like "heroku up" to get your app running on the web with minimal fuss. this appears to be a project to give you the niceities of a PAAS, without actually providing the platform.

dangus 2y ago
Heroku still exists, it just sucks. Owned by Salesforce.
- mega-tux 2y ago
  Heroku is still good for tons of stuff. After Salesforce bought it, it stopped getting much better, they removed part of free quota, some add-ons disappeared, and the like. For example, http2 support just went beta on may. It's a shame.

bulatb 2y ago

"Serverless" means there's no stateful application server in your architecture. No instance, just callable code. Shell script, not daemon. You write narrow business-level functions that take inputs, do their business, and give you the output. They're called, they run, they terminate and carry nothing forward. You deploy them to a hosting platform which will handle making them available, routing requests, and all the other stuff that's incidental to doing the work. The only thing that's your concern is the logic that turns inputs into outputs. At least that's the pitch. Technically a PHP script that you run as CGI through Nginx is "serverless" that way, though of course it's hosted with a software server running on a hardware server. It's serverless because you write a PHP script and it doesn't care what runs it or what's going on around it. It doesn't need to work within the context of an application server like an endpoint in a Django or a Rails app would. Someone else could own a bunch of servers running Nginx, you'd give them prettyprint.php, and it would pretty-print your JSON or whatever at the URL they'd give you. Services that do this are called serverless platforms. The hosting model is called "functions as a service" (FaaS). If you like the architecture but you don't want FaaS from Amazon, Heroku, or some other third party, you can host yourself a mini FaaS with something like Dokku.