5 ms·

The term "serverless" is a generic PaaS marketing term to refer to managed services where you don't have to manage a server to use them, e.g. "Amazon Aurora Ser

by jchw 1y ago

The term "serverless" is a generic PaaS marketing term to refer to managed services where you don't have to manage a server to use them, e.g. "Amazon Aurora Serverless". If you're managing CGI scripts on a traditional server, you're still managing a server. The point isn't really that the application is unaware of the server, it's that the server is entirely abstracted away from you. CGI vs serverless is apples vs oranges. > [...] but the term is being used to sell to developers. It communicates to them, quite literally, that they don't have to make their application a server [...] I don't agree. It is being sold to businesses, that they don't have to manage a server. The point is that you're paying someone else to be the sysadmin and getting all of the details abstracted away from you. Appealing to developers by making their lives easier is definitely a perk, but that's not why the term "serverless" exists. Before PaaSes I don't think I've ever seen anyone once call CGI "serverless".

9rx 1y ago
> It is being sold to businesses, that they don't have to manage a server. Do you mean a... computer? Server is a software term. It is a process that listens for network requests. At least since CGI went out of fashion, embedding a server right in your application has been the style. Serverless sees a return to the application being less a server, pushing the networking bits somewhere else. Modern solutions may not use CGI specifically, but the idea is the same. If you did mistakenly type "server" when you really meant "computer", PaaS offerings already removed the need for businesses to manage computers long before serverless came around. "Serverless" appeared specifically in reference to the CGI-style execution model, it being the literal description of what it is.
- jchw 1y ago
  > Do you mean a... computer? Server is a software term. It is a process that listens for network requests. Between this and the guy arguing that UNIX doesn't have "folders" I can see that these kinds of threads bring out the most insane possible lines of rhetoric. Are you sincerely telling me right now you've never seen the term "server" used to refer to computers that run servers? Jesus Christ. Pedantry isn't a contest, and I'm not trying to win it. I'm not sitting here saying that "Serverless is not a marketing term for CGI" to pull some epic "well, actually..." I'm saying it because God damnit, it's true. Serverless was a term invented specifically by providers of computers-that-aren't-yours to give people options to not need to manage the computers-that-aren't-yours. They actually use this term serverless for many things, again including databases, where you don't even write an application or a server in the first place; we're just using "serverless" as a synonym for "serverless function", which I am fine to do, but pointing that out is important for more than just pedantry reasons because it helps extinguish the idea that "serverless" was ever meant to have anything to do with application design. It isn't and doesn't. Serverless is not a marketing term for CGI. Not even in a relaxed way, it's just not. The selling point of Serverless functions is "you give us your request handler and we'll handle running it and scaling it up". This has nothing to do with the rise of embedding a server into your application.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > Serverless was a term invented specifically by providers of computers-that-aren't-yours to give people options to not need to manage the computers-that-aren't-yours. No. "Cloud" was the term invented for that, inherited from networking diagrams where it was common to represent the bits you don't manage as cloud figures. Usage of "Serverless" emerged from AWS Lamba, which was designed to have an execution model much like CGI. "Severless" refers to your application being less a server. Lamba may not use CGI specifically, but the general idea is very much the same.
    - jchw 1y ago
      Okay. Let's ask Amazon since they invented the term: > Serverless computing is an application development model where you can build and deploy applications on third-party managed server infrastructure. All applications require servers to run. But in the serverless model, a cloud provider manages the routine work; they provision, scale, and maintain the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider handles several tasks, such as operating system management, security patches, file system and capacity management, load balancing, monitoring, and logging. As a result, your developers can focus on application design and still receive the benefits of cost-effective, efficient, and massively scalable server infrastructure. Right. And that makes sense. Because again, what we're talking about when we're talking about AWS Lambda is serverless functions. But AWS also uses the term for other things that are "serverless", again, like Aurora Serverless. Aurora Serverless is basically the same idea: the infrastructure is abstracted, except for a database. This effectively means the database can transparently scale from 0 to whatever the maximum instance sizes Amazon supports without a human managing database instances. That's also the same idea for serverless functions. It's not about whether your application has a "server" in it.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        > Serverless computing is an application development model Exactly. And how that development model differs from the traditional approach is that you don't have to implement a server. Deployment isn't a development model. The development is necessarily done by the time you get there. > But AWS also uses the term for other things The terms has expended to be used for all kinds of different things, sure. There is probably a toaster out there somewhere solid as being "Serverless" nowadays. If we really want to get into the thick of it, "serverless" seems to go back much further, used to refer to certain P2P systems. But we know from context that isn't what we're talking about. Given the context, it is clear we are talking about "serverless" as it emerged out of Lamba, referring to systems that were CGI-esq in nature.
kragen 1y ago
> If you're managing CGI scripts on a traditional server, you're still managing a server. Usually somebody else is managing the server, or servers, so you don't have to think about it. That's been how it's worked for 30 years. > Before PaaSes I don't think I've ever seen anyone once call CGI "serverless". No, because "serverless" was a marketing term invented to sell PaaSes because they thought that it would sell better than something like "CloudCGI" (as in FastCGI or SpeedyCGI, which also don't use the CGI protocol). But CGI hosting fits cleanly within the roomy confines of the term.
- jchw 1y ago
  Oh my god! This could go on forever. Having a guy named Steve manage your servers is not "serverless" by my definition, because it's not about you personally having to manage the server, it's about anyone personally having to manage it. AWS Lambda is managed by Amazon as a singular giant computer spawning micro VMs. And sure yes, some human has to sit here and do operations, but the point is that they've truly abstracted the concept of a running server from both their side and yours. It's abstracted to the degree that even asking "what machine am I running on?" doesn't even have a meaningful answer and if you did have the answer you couldn't do anything with it. Shared hosting with a cgi-bin is closer to this, but it falls short of fully abstracting the details. You're still running on a normal-ish server with shared resources and a web server configuration and all that jazz, it's just that you don't personally have to manage it... But someone really does personally have to manage it. And anyway, there's no reason to think that serverless platforms are limited to things that don't actually run a server. On the contrary there are "serverless" platforms that run servers! Yes, truly, as far as I know containers running under cloud run are in fact normal HTTP servers. I'm actually not an expert on serverless despite having to be on this end of the argument, but I'll let Google speak for what it means for Cloud Run to be "serverless": > Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management, so you can focus on what matters most — building great applications. These PaaSes popularized the term to mean this from the gitgo, just because you have passionately formed a belief that it ever meant something else doesn't change a thing.

by jchw 1y ago

9rx 1y ago

> It is being sold to businesses, that they don't have to manage a server. Do you mean a... computer? Server is a software term. It is a process that listens for network requests. At least since CGI went out of fashion, embedding a server right in your application has been the style. Serverless sees a return to the application being less a server, pushing the networking bits somewhere else. Modern solutions may not use CGI specifically, but the idea is the same. If you did mistakenly type "server" when you really meant "computer", PaaS offerings already removed the need for businesses to manage computers long before serverless came around. "Serverless" appeared specifically in reference to the CGI-style execution model, it being the literal description of what it is.

jchw 1y ago
> Do you mean a... computer? Server is a software term. It is a process that listens for network requests. Between this and the guy arguing that UNIX doesn't have "folders" I can see that these kinds of threads bring out the most insane possible lines of rhetoric. Are you sincerely telling me right now you've never seen the term "server" used to refer to computers that run servers? Jesus Christ. Pedantry isn't a contest, and I'm not trying to win it. I'm not sitting here saying that "Serverless is not a marketing term for CGI" to pull some epic "well, actually..." I'm saying it because God damnit, it's true. Serverless was a term invented specifically by providers of computers-that-aren't-yours to give people options to not need to manage the computers-that-aren't-yours. They actually use this term serverless for many things, again including databases, where you don't even write an application or a server in the first place; we're just using "serverless" as a synonym for "serverless function", which I am fine to do, but pointing that out is important for more than just pedantry reasons because it helps extinguish the idea that "serverless" was ever meant to have anything to do with application design. It isn't and doesn't. Serverless is not a marketing term for CGI. Not even in a relaxed way, it's just not. The selling point of Serverless functions is "you give us your request handler and we'll handle running it and scaling it up". This has nothing to do with the rise of embedding a server into your application.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > Serverless was a term invented specifically by providers of computers-that-aren't-yours to give people options to not need to manage the computers-that-aren't-yours. No. "Cloud" was the term invented for that, inherited from networking diagrams where it was common to represent the bits you don't manage as cloud figures. Usage of "Serverless" emerged from AWS Lamba, which was designed to have an execution model much like CGI. "Severless" refers to your application being less a server. Lamba may not use CGI specifically, but the general idea is very much the same.
  - jchw 1y ago
    Okay. Let's ask Amazon since they invented the term: > Serverless computing is an application development model where you can build and deploy applications on third-party managed server infrastructure. All applications require servers to run. But in the serverless model, a cloud provider manages the routine work; they provision, scale, and maintain the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider handles several tasks, such as operating system management, security patches, file system and capacity management, load balancing, monitoring, and logging. As a result, your developers can focus on application design and still receive the benefits of cost-effective, efficient, and massively scalable server infrastructure. Right. And that makes sense. Because again, what we're talking about when we're talking about AWS Lambda is serverless functions. But AWS also uses the term for other things that are "serverless", again, like Aurora Serverless. Aurora Serverless is basically the same idea: the infrastructure is abstracted, except for a database. This effectively means the database can transparently scale from 0 to whatever the maximum instance sizes Amazon supports without a human managing database instances. That's also the same idea for serverless functions. It's not about whether your application has a "server" in it.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      > Serverless computing is an application development model Exactly. And how that development model differs from the traditional approach is that you don't have to implement a server. Deployment isn't a development model. The development is necessarily done by the time you get there. > But AWS also uses the term for other things The terms has expended to be used for all kinds of different things, sure. There is probably a toaster out there somewhere solid as being "Serverless" nowadays. If we really want to get into the thick of it, "serverless" seems to go back much further, used to refer to certain P2P systems. But we know from context that isn't what we're talking about. Given the context, it is clear we are talking about "serverless" as it emerged out of Lamba, referring to systems that were CGI-esq in nature.

kragen 1y ago

> If you're managing CGI scripts on a traditional server, you're still managing a server. Usually somebody else is managing the server, or servers, so you don't have to think about it. That's been how it's worked for 30 years. > Before PaaSes I don't think I've ever seen anyone once call CGI "serverless". No, because "serverless" was a marketing term invented to sell PaaSes because they thought that it would sell better than something like "CloudCGI" (as in FastCGI or SpeedyCGI, which also don't use the CGI protocol). But CGI hosting fits cleanly within the roomy confines of the term.

jchw 1y ago
Oh my god! This could go on forever. Having a guy named Steve manage your servers is not "serverless" by my definition, because it's not about you personally having to manage the server, it's about anyone personally having to manage it. AWS Lambda is managed by Amazon as a singular giant computer spawning micro VMs. And sure yes, some human has to sit here and do operations, but the point is that they've truly abstracted the concept of a running server from both their side and yours. It's abstracted to the degree that even asking "what machine am I running on?" doesn't even have a meaningful answer and if you did have the answer you couldn't do anything with it. Shared hosting with a cgi-bin is closer to this, but it falls short of fully abstracting the details. You're still running on a normal-ish server with shared resources and a web server configuration and all that jazz, it's just that you don't personally have to manage it... But someone really does personally have to manage it. And anyway, there's no reason to think that serverless platforms are limited to things that don't actually run a server. On the contrary there are "serverless" platforms that run servers! Yes, truly, as far as I know containers running under cloud run are in fact normal HTTP servers. I'm actually not an expert on serverless despite having to be on this end of the argument, but I'll let Google speak for what it means for Cloud Run to be "serverless": > Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management, so you can focus on what matters most — building great applications. These PaaSes popularized the term to mean this from the gitgo, just because you have passionately formed a belief that it ever meant something else doesn't change a thing.