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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

So this is question I've wanted to ask for awhile.

Is AWS Lambda really "serverless", or is the server part just buried so deep in the stack that the app devs can disregard it?

And if it is truly "serverless", what mechanism is being used to "serve" the function calls? How is this radically different from say a REST-api that auto-routes function names from url POSTs and GETs?

I suppose I could look all this stuff up, but to be honest having a quick rundown of this tech stack here on HN sure would save me the time.

Thanks in advance.

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Obviously it does have servers and is quite similar to the router you describe. It's also similar to the old CGI and FastCGI systems.

It's only serverless in the sense that you don't have to use servers as a unit of account; at no point do you have to say "how many servers are we paying for?" or "what sort of servers should we get/lease/instantiate on EC2".

Rarely the meaning of a technology name is "obvious", this particular name is pretty misleading (every single tutorial about the topic starts explaining that serverless doesn't really mean serverless). The first time I heard about serverless, I imagined some kind of decentralized technology, but as we all know, it turned out to be a marketing thing.

It is serverless in the sense that the dev (or sysadm) doesn't have to worry about the server. You can't touch anything that affects the OS in any way, you only really give it your code and binaries to run.

In ways it's similar to Heroku but with a very different pricing model.

So it can’t even be packaged cleanly and properly into rpm’s or dpkg’s?

It's the latter. The server is just abstracted away. As far as I know lambda is just docker containers running on EC2.

They’re not Docker containers specially, but they are containers.

It almost certainly runs on servers, but from the developer's perspective, it doesn't matter. It could be hamsters on wheels. It's abstracted from you.

Lambda is just code execution. API Gateway is the service that maps REST API endpoints to Lambda function executions.

"Serverless" means you don't have to manage the servers or the infrastructure. AWS(or whoever) abstracts this part for you.

And yes, in some sense, they do abstract this away for you, but then you just have different kind of problems. So your efforts just shift towards other difficulties presented by such technologies. But I digress :)

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