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Comment by talawahdotnet | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the choice of the name "serverless" is unnecessarily confusing/controversial, but I like the concept.

The ability to scale down to zero could certainly be useful for automated testing use cases.

As with anything on AWS it will take some testing to discover all the quirks and caveats, but I like the general direction this is headed.

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AWS tends to put the name "serverless" to anything that is designed to work with the rest of their serverless platform.

In this case, Aurora Serverless gets the name because it will scale to 0 which is useful for things like Lambda or Batch functions that only get called sporadically.

I don't get why using a multitenant setup for MySQL (like in the PHP days) isn't a much better solution for this, as it doesn't require many instances of MySQL (or many VMs each running a single instance), nor does it require constant resources. This does require constant resource use, and you incur the significant startup delay for what seems to me very little reason.

But I guess for Amazon, inefficiency translates to $$$, so wouldn't really make sense to do this.

I wonder that more generally about cloud as well. For many things making the backends multitenant would be far cheaper for the customers and just a bit more expensive for the providers ... there's the security aspect (but is it really that different ? Even with VMs the kernel and hypervisors still need to not leak information, and even with Physical servers the "reboot and recovery" and remote control mechanisms are often still avenues for security exploits)

This low level separation is easy and cheap to implement for the providers, but (it seems to me) much more expensive for the customers.

But I guess that's pretty much true for all cloud stuff. It provides automation, but at an operational cost, which is really not the trade off I'd like to make.

The general trend is serverless because not thinking about scaling is a very nice idea for developers and companies.

Once you see your environment adapt to the load on the fly, I don't think you ever want to go back to manually handling it.

Initially, I was responding to agree with you. However, my first renaming thought was for autoscaling aurora which I realized was incorrect because you still have to deal with things like server security updates.

Serverless sounds like the better term to me still because it sounds exactly like what it describes: you never have to deal with a server. Although, I would actually add auto scaling to the name (serverless autoscaling aurora) so users know they don't have to deal with servers nor autoscaling.

What do you guys think?

Can any marketers comment because I feel like this has gotta be purely due to marketers not wanting their product to become a generic term since litery no company names any product in a way that directly describes their product.

So Azure SQL Database, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Bot Service does not describe the products? AWS is hilariousy bad at naming. Not all companies are.

I very much prefer AWS names to the Azure naming, but I don't like Windows culture or behavior either so I think it's just general dislike of Microsoft software.

It sounds like you describe something which is irrational.

Azure does have a benefit of hindsight, and often their stuff is just named Azure + Obvious Name.

On the other hand, they came up with Bing (talk about hilariously bad), and Azure. Which they've chosen to pronounce AZH-ər (Ajer) and not AZ-yoor (Ajur, like in Côte d'Azur). This is non-obvious, and makes them sound like uncultured Americans (like when you pronounce niche as nitch; instead of like cache, which I haven't heard pronounced catch (yet)).

Yes. In my view, obvious names makes it easier to remember what something is or does. Understanding what Azure DNS do is easier than finding out and remembering what AWS Route 52 does.

*53. It's the DNS port number, but yes, not a great name.

You don't really "deal with" servers in regular Aurora, but you do pay for them. So AFAIK regular Aurora is billed by the hour while "serverless" Aurora is by the hour but only during hours when it's being used. And serverless Lambda is billed per request, so it seems like AWS isn't even using a consistent definition.

Don't you? It has been a while since I set one up but I'm pretty sure I had to set the versions and I think you have to launch 2 servers because they have to be part of a "cluster". Shit, I remember I was trying to delete them because I was just experimenting with it to compare with our RDS instances but I couldn't figure out how to delete them (aurora instance was slave to our normal RDS instance and the console kept complaining about something when I tried to delete them after my testing was done. My poor team is probably still paying for those instances)

Function as a Services? ( FaaS )

After all we have Container, Platform, Infrastructure as a Services.

Second that. Serverless is a buzzword like AI. But the concept is brilliant from many perspectives. It may save architects and developers from db scaling headaches.

> The ability to scale down to zero could certainly be useful for automated testing use cases.

Isn't that exactly Pricing Example 2?

Yup. I was just saying it is a useful feature.

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