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Comment by mirko22 | Hacker News Reader

> so "serverless" means "unprovisioned/unconfigurable" machines

I am pretty sure in English serverless means no server and "unprovisioned/unconfigurable" machines means you didn't provision them and you cannot configure them. Even in analogical sense this makes no sense. Something i could relate to is something like "Pay as you use" or "configurationless servers".

But that is just me, and if you think it is ok to randomly change the meaning of words that means me personally and randomly don't need to accept your new meaning (not giving out, just trying to explain my rationale)

Downvote all you want, but please do point out where i am wrong.

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> please do point out where i am wrong

Because speech (and writing) can be figurative, not just literal. And because the term has reached wide adoption (at least, in the subset interested in discussing such things) and so not using the term makes conversation difficult and litigating the issue every time it's discussed adds no value to the discussion whatsoever.

In a very literal sense, you're not wrong. But the concept of a serverless architecture (as of common parlance today in 2017) has a lot of nuances which are hard to convey in any single word.

So eventually people picked one. Today, the most common are "serverless architecture", "FaaS", or simply "Lambda" (borrowing from AWS).

You don't have to do anything. But it's simply a fact that many people know what you're talking about if you say the word "serverless". And that's what language is, a (kinda) agreed upon set of words which let you communicate with other people. If everyone but you understands a word, and you are crusading that they change it to something else, what is the point?

If you're interested, the concept of "prescriptivism" may be enlightening.

My point is that i was not aware what "serverless" meant when i first came upon it and the word itself did not convey any meaning without a lot of context as it does not lend it self to analogies such as "server", "container" or even "cloud" for that matter.

I get you. Neither was I. But at a certain level, words are arbitrary and imperfect anyway. In your own example, "cloud" is often regarded as a bad term, because it tends to abstract away too much that it's just "somebody else's computer", as it's often defined.

Lots of discussions have been had on how many people think "the cloud" is a sorta-magical thing, which "is just there". Just more recently some interesting aspects of "using the cloud" have been more thoroughly discussed (e.g. the jurisdiction it's hosted in, data breaches, etc). If the concept was described in a less abstract way, would these discussions have happened sooner? Later? Would it have become less of a "buzzword" amongst executives?

So, is "cloud" really a better term than "serverless"?

True. I regularly encounter words whose meanings in whatever context I don't understand. Usually, if a word sounds confusing or used in the wrong context, a quick Google search will clarify what I was missing. Sure its a bit irritating when words are recycled to have a different meaning, but its rarely an issue in practice, in my experience and opinion.

The ship sailed a while ago for common nomenclature for “function in the cloud” services. You can’t really fault someone for using the term the way the entire industry uses it.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think calling them “configuration-less” or “pay as you go” servers is any more accurate. You’re really just buying processing time.

I'm also pretty sure most cloud systems contain very few condensed water droplets. The containers I work with are not 20 or 40 foot long, and while I ship stuff with their help, no actual ships are involved.

Could there have been a better word than serverless? Probably, but that is the one that is currently used for that general kind of architecture. I would have called that PaaS before, and sometimes still do.

I explicitly stated that by analogy it does not make sense, while containers contain something and works as analogy. But you chose to disregard that part of the answer.

The "serverless" in this context means that they may as well be invisible to you, since you don't need to care about them. In the case of Lambda, you upload your code somehow Amazon runs it on a spare server somewhere.

Language is all about context. The meaning of words changes depending on it, even in plain English settings.

You're not wrong. "Pay as you use" doesn't quite capture it, and "configurationless servers" isn't quite buzz-wordy (eg. short and memorable) to make marketable.

Wide spread terminology suffers from the evolutionary pressures of marketing. Only the catchiest, most marketable terms propagate.

> please do point out where i am wrong.

In reality, words are often used in ways that don't necessarily meet the dictionary definition in the strictest sense.

For example, I complained to my local advertising authority that mobile providers are using the word "unlimited" to mean "limited by our fair usage policy" and I was told that this is fine as long as 95% (I don't remember the exact percentage, maybe it was 99) of customers will never reach the limit so its effectively unlimited. That's not really what the english language word means, but hey... that's life. Same thing applies here: words are recycled to have different meanings.

Its a bad example because saying something is unlimited when its not is kind of bullshit not just semantics.

There are situations when I think its best to just go with the flow of how people are commonly using words but simply accepting what others say in a blanket sense is not right either. In the case of "serverless" it doesnt really matter much to me, but if you think of the word "gyp" for example thats something many people have had to make a conceited effort to stop using. So in some cases, with effort we can improve the language we use and not always be swimming against the tide.

"Serverless" means "I can run code without having to maintain my own server or execution environment". Using the term "serverless" for that might be confusing and non-literal, but that's how we use it, and the term has stuck. Arguing about that several years ago may have made sense, but that ship sailed long ago.

You're not wrong. I usually call them "application-less" architectures. That's really what's going on here.

I get it, I do. But that ship sailed loooong ago

While you're at it, Don Quixote, please convince X-Windows to stop abusing the words client and server, too.

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