Ask HN: Without Googling it, what's your definition of Serverless? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Without Googling it, what's your definition of Serverless?

3 pointsmrmrcoleman5 comments

We (http://implicit-explicit.com/) are helping organise ServerlessConf (http://serverlessconf.io/) along with A Cloud Guru (https://acloud.guru/), RedMonk (redmonk.com/) and Serverless.com.

A lot of people have been asking me, 'What is Serverless' and after giving my answer a bunch of times I got bored and start flipping the question back to the questioner.

I've been amazed by the huge number of different answers I've received, so I figured let's have some fun and open it up to HN.

What's you definition of Serverless?

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I define serverless as something that is client-only and/or peer-to-peer.

In that sense I'm baffled that you guys define Serverless as something that relies on services on Amazon's servers.

Yeah, I agree with the other commenters that "serverless" is a pretty silly way to describe something that involves lots and lots of servers.

If you told me you created a "serverless app" or your app had a "serverless architecture" I would think it either had no off-device communication, or only peer-to-peer communication.

That said, I totally understand the reasoning behind calling a backend composed of lots of 3rd-party services "serverless". You're not doing as much of the work of maintaining a traditional server-side app. And if you just have a few Lambda functions that hook into data stores you don't have to think about anything that resembles a server in a more traditional sense.

The "serverless" term is kind of brilliant from a marketing perspective. It's ambiguous, a little confusing, and really just wrong. People will love to point out how stupid it is. And that means they'll think about it, and remember it, and tell other people about it. And then they'll get used to it and it won't seem wrong or stupid - it'll just be the way you describe these kinds of systems.

I find this a really confusing concept. It something is sitting on a Digital Ocean / AWS server then it's a server, no matter how you package it, I don't care how that JSON is returned to my client.

I know what it means btw: decoupled microservices instead of a complex webapps.

This fits with what I've seen so far. People are confused by the term serverless. My understanding is that it refers to the fact that there is less interaction with servers, on the traditional server admin level.

I'll be speaking to a lot of people at ServerlessConf next week and will be curious to see the outcome.

Perhaps I'll blog about it and drop a link here on HN.

peer2peer applications of all kinds (e.g. BitTorrent, even though people use servers as downloaders or seedboxes, they are not required)

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