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Comment by MrFurious | Hacker News Reader

I think that the best name is "server for dummies".

As far as I know, all the projects that promote themselves as "serverless" are stateless functions and not designed to store states, which means if you want a database you will need to store it elsewhere and utilize it from the "serverless" container. So no DB for you out of the box if you want to use serverless architecture.

So I don't think it's for "dummies". Dummies want an all-in-one server.

> As far as I know, all the projects that promote themselves as "serverless" are stateless functions…

Any normal PHP app is just a collection of stateless functions, but that doesn't automatically make all PHP apps "serverless" apps. What makes something "serverless" is the FaaS[1] execution model.

[1] https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

Or, you know, it's better to reference the source: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-robinson-www-interface-00

Most PHP apps are run by DBs. They are not stateless.

Most "FaaS" apps also access a remote datastore as well. The fundamental value of most web software applications revolves around state transformation in some way or another. FaaS just "cleans up" the application state insofar as it forces the state boundary to a comparatively slow edge and doesn't let you, for example, store things in in-memory shared datastores.

in the past year or so i've seen serverless extended to anything where the underlying compute is abstracted away. so ex. bigquery and dynamodb, two very stateful services, are also described as serverless.

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