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Comment by spriggan3 | Hacker News Reader

> I guess it's like wireless... Something could be wireless from the perspective of the end user but there are still wires actually there.

It's a bad analogy. As a developer you are supposed to know they are wires somewhere. That's why all this marketing is dangerous. the obfuscation which makes everything sound like "voodoo and black magic".

> The developer doesn't have to deal with servers/infrastructure so for them the system is serverless.

Yes he does, he has to configure and manage the whole thing on Amazon dashboard. Sure he doesn't have to spin upcontainers, but autoscaling doesn't make something "serverless". And again, you need API gateway to communicate with the outside world. So there is still a server fronting the whole thing.

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I think we might be thinking about Serverless slightly differently. To me serverless is not just AWS Lambda. It's a broader theme that encompasses Function-as-a-Service technologies like Lambda and Backend-as-a-Service technologies like Firebase & Auth0.

Combining FaaS, BaaS, and using certain techniques and patterns is what makes Serverless. As a developer I am plenty aware that there are servers - I don't feel that there is any voodoo or black magic. However, when someone says that they have a serverless system I immediately understand what they are trying to say. They are saying that they don't need to manage, provision, scale, and look after servers. Honestly, the world "serverless" is a lot less confusing than "cloud".

I am not sure what you mean by "there is still a server fronting the whole thing". You don't need to scale the API Gateway yourself (again it's a managed service). Same goes for Azure functions, Google Cloud Functions and OpenWhisk as they all have HTTP listeners built in.

I understand where your thinking is coming from. There was this article that tried to address it: https://serverless.zone/serverless-is-just-a-name-we-could-h...

Edit: fixed sentence structure.

> However, when someone says that they have a serverless system I immediately understand what they are trying to say.

Obviously we don't as I don't consider the expression "serverless" accurate in describing what is really happening. Call it what it really is : pubsub, calling it "serverless" is misleading marketing.

> You don't need to scale the API Gateway

You still need API Gateway to communicate with the outside world, here is your server, you know exactly what I mean. What you call "serverless" didn't invent autoscaling in PAAS.

It's interesting by the way that you keep using product names "Lambda", "API Gateway" which aren't concepts but Amazon products. That's marketing. It's like calling all social networks "Facebooks". "Serverless" is a marketing device to sell Amazon services, I think people get it by now.

> It's interesting by the way that you keep using product names "Lambda", "API Gateway" which aren't concepts but Amazon products. That's marketing. It's like calling all social networks "Facebooks". "Serverless" is a marketing device to sell Amazon services, I think people get it by now.

Amazon is a leader in this area right now but let's not use them. We can talk about Microsoft, IBM, or Google. They use "serverless" to describe their products. Google calls cloud functions a "serverless platform" and "serverless microservices" (https://cloud.google.com/functions/).

Azure functions talk about "processing events with serverless code" and so on. I only meant to use Amazon is an example because people are more familiar with their products.

Serverless is just a descriptor for these kinds of technologies and patterns.

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