Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

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People abuse the term serverless, yes to mean "cloud" or "somebody else server" and "just write the function you want we will find a server to run it on and report to you the result".

The term I like to associate with serverless is all peer-to-peer, not client-server architecture, for example any datwebsite, on datproject, and any zsite on zeronet.

There you dont have a server, really, a zite is a peer in a torrent swarm like any other, and can be found like any other torrent by its infohash (sha1) in the DHT, and can at any time go offline, while the swarm continues as nothing happened, new people can still access the zite from peers - and the zite despite rendering in a web-browser, can/should not really talk to any server, only to a peer-to-peer network. There is no "form submit" allowed on a zite, then it defeats the purpose of zeronet and similar techniques.

Another example is gun.js

You are coming up with your ow definition of serverless. For most people serverless means

1. Per invocation billing 2. No need to provision resources ahead of time

Taking AWS's example

1. EC2 is not serverless but Lambda is 2. RDS is not serverless but Aurora Serverless is.

It's not their own definition, this was the default definition just a few years ago.

People started to use the term for something else and now it became the main meaning.

"Serverless" is nowadays "AWS Lambda" (and similar products).

I wish people called it FaaS (function as a service), but they call it "serverless", and it's fine I guess

Yeah, now the term is an oxymoron, "serverless" but there is a server and a client.

This is not what "serverless" means nowadays.

What "serverless" means, in the context of the article (and basically how anyone uses it today), is "AWS Lambda" (or FaaS). The name is kinda stupid, since it still uses servers; it's just that you don't need to care about them and scaling is done magically by Amazon.

That is very interesting topic. If you were able to add secure computation with some kind of homomorphic encryption [0] it could be possible to get rid of centralized compute vendors. The only issue is the performance of such computations which are still cheaper to run unencrypted in a trusted env.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

Serverless means "I don't have to maintain or even know anything about a server", not "there is no server".

If so any memory-managed language should be called memoryless, any non-low-level language should be called osless and so on. It's an absurd naming scheme.

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