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Comment by zambal | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's beating a dead horse and the article itself seems fine, but the submission title sounds a bit ridiculous.

"Install this software on your server to make it serverless!"

I'll never forget one time in a large meeting when the technical experts were asked by one of the c suites what serverless meant. One brave soul rose to the challenge and after some fumbling around in their answer, they ended it with "you basically just upload the code to the server and then the server runs the code for you".

Took awhile for the cringing to go away on that one.

I don’t think it’s a hard thing to explain though:

Serverless is marketing term that loosely describes a shared tenancy environment where you don’t manage the host.

This describes e.g. Heroku.

The opening bit “marketing term that loosely...” clearly explains that it’s pretty arbitrary when a service is called “serverless” and that decision is usually just a marketing one. Which is precisely true.

There’s no formal definition for “serverless”; it literally is just a marketing term that loosely describes shared tendency environment and The only reason Heroku isn’t “serverless” is because they don’t market themselves as that.

So it’s a pointless exercise nitpicking anyone’s definition since there isn’t an actual formal definition. Eg AWS uses the term serverless to describe other services that isn’t lambda.

The whole term is just made up marketing bullshit for shared tendency.

In the 70s we used to call it time sharing. But I doubt many people these days will remember that term.

A commonly made distinction between the two is that Heroku still exposes instances to you: You buy a number of "dynos". Whereas a "serverless" solution doesn't, e.g. lambda just spins up workers as needed and bills you for the CPU time used.

In that case that falls into the latter exception I made where you manage the host; albeit the management is just “buy an instance”.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, Serverless is actually servers.

https://darkscience.net/quotes/#209

But an automobile is literally horseless. There's no rented horse hidden under layers of abstraction. I guess that "someoneelsesserverful" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

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