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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

> Serverless computing is in a much earlier stage of adoption, with nearly half of developers failing to clearly understand what it is.

I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on servers. It's a made up term that isn't grounded in reality. It's not serverless any more than a Heroku Dyno is Serverless.

The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser application.

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Also it fits in nicely with the other naming conventions such as the following:

- Software as a Service (SaaS) - a product such as GitHub or Slack

- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - VM or LB as you find in Azure or AWS or Digital Ocean

- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - sometimes called Container as a Service as you find in Heroku or Zeit Now

- Function as as Service (FaaS) - a single function as you find in Lambda

Technically CaaS could be IaaS, if you're just using containers as lightweight VM substitutes.

Practically CaaS tends to be PaaS, because the hosting service is also providing a platform such as Kubernetes.

What's the practical difference between FaaS and the old style mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python and friends ?

I think the difference is that you don’t know if the server is running Apache or nginx or IIS because it’s abstracted away.

The only interface is the input into the function and the output it returns.

"/cgi-bin/ Rides Again" was left on the cutting-room floor.

I see people getting excited about something new "past REST"... which by that what they mean is RPC.

> The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser application.

So the term "serverless" made you think there was no server involved? What could have possibly made you think that?

"Serverless" is up there with "cloud" for the dumbest most overused words in technology right now.

BitTorrent and Napster is what made me think that

I think he was being sarcastic...

I was. I refuse to use "/s" though.

I feel like I know more after just reading your post.

I'd like to hear from the Erlang camp. It amuses me to think about what they must think of us darn kids taking their ideas and calling them something else.

What's really the difference between FaaS and Erlang style message passing?

> I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue

But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.

The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:"

* S3

* API Gateway

* SQS

* SNS

* Cognito

* DynamoDB

* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)

* Step Functions

In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per-node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing to use at low scale.

"Functions as a service" covers serverless compute, but it doesn't cover the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.

All of those would fall under IaaS/PaaS.

If we're qualifying anything on a server that developers don't have to manage themselves as serverless than anything with an API becomes serverless...despite all of them actually running on servers.

OK. I guess to me categorizing those things in the same bucket as EC2 or Salesforce is missing a pretty fundamental architectural difference and benefit. I'm not claiming "serverless" is an ideal term, but I haven't seen the case made for anything better.

Those are just managed services, as in managed versions of I/P/F/S-aaS.

"Serverless" can be applied to every SaaS product ever made and is just an all-around meaningless and dumb-sounding term.

(aws employee)

The distinction I've heard and make (regardless of serverless being the right term) is that these infrastructure services expose their control plane and data plane without tying you to the concept of a particular machine. Compare this to all publicly available forms of RDS where I still have to think in terms of machines for scaling and management.

None of those are "serverless"

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