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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Isn't "serverless" just a fancy way of saying "someone else's containers"?

Yeah, the whole serverless makes no sense. There is a server running probably in a container handling your code. Who came up with this weird name?

> Who came up with this weird name?

Amazon popularized it, but Ken Fromm's use is the earliest mention I've been able to find (from 2012): http://readwrite.com/2012/10/15/why-the-future-of-software-a...

We were using the term serverless at PiCloud since 2010.

Source: memory and https://www.techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/picloud-launches-serve...

I was discussing a project with a potential client ( I think they were called Threeships ) who used ActiveX and a lot of investment to create full p2p software and indeed serverless. Horrible tech that time but yes, that could be considered serverless; if there is a server (as in one physical or virtual machine handling multiple client software execution requests) it is not serverless. It is quite possible to let every client run their own request theoretically so you can make serverless but amazon is not.

> Isn't "serverless" just a fancy way of saying "someone else's containers"?

No, "serverless" just means that there are no servers (or VMs, or containers) to be directly managed by the developer.

I agree with you about that definition, but just to be clear the author disambiguates in this article and describes serverless to mean FaaS in the context of the article.

In that sense, any 3rd party API, e.g. Stripe, or whatever, is "serverless" from the standpoint of the developer using it, but I doubt many would think of it that way.

You can't upload your own code to the stripe API.

Someone else manages your containers and you manage the code.

That may change. S3, for example, is a building block for applications and abstracts away servers completely from the developer.

As do the following:

* SQS

* SNS

* DynamoDB

* Step Functions

* Lambda

* API Gateway

* CloudWatch Logs

* Cognito

* DynamoDB

You can build entire applications with the services above and never have to bother managing instances. It's not just about running code.

… which means that you have much less control and when something goes wrong, you can't fix it.

To be clear, I enjoy having this as a tool available but not every problem is the same and not every organization is the same.

This discussion about the name comes up in every single thread about serverless

See prev discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16406822

No, because serverless has much more restrictive rules than containers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com