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Comment by aivisol | Hacker News Reader

I believe "serverless" in a way how it is used in this context means there is no top down full server starting from hardware all the way up to the OS available to you exclusively. Instead you just use services which you need for tasks you need. Think storage buckets for your files, lambda functions for your scripts, load balancers for your traffic etc. They do run on servers, but you never have access to the server itself.

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I would echo this. Believe it or not, AWS also run many many servers to power Lambda :-)

Not every term in computing is literal. Think about "the cloud" - is it really in the sky? Of course not and Serverless like aivisol is rightly pointing out is an approach and architecture.

To the developer, it's "serverless" when they don't have to care about infrastructure. So if you're using OpenFaaS Cloud or AWS Lambda, as a developer you literally don't have to care.

Isn't that what webhosting providers have offered for at least a decade? No server management, just resources on a server with a web server, data storage (often MySQL) and the ability to execute code (mostly PHP). You run your software on a server without ever accessing the server itself or having to worry about OS updates.

I think the biggest difference is webhosting provider can't scale your php resource up and down infinitely in real time. Your software is not exposed to the server but constrained by it. The idea of serverless is that your service is automatically distributed and not constrained by the capability of some web server.

Infinitely?

To scale shipping static content, I'd rather look into CDN with proper caching, instead of maintaining ten layers of abstraction just to feel good about how modern my stack is.

Yes, but what about non-static?

Also, a CDN would also classify as "serverless", under the definition used by the article.

I think OP is quite aware of the distinction, yet I would also argue that 'serverless' doesn't apply to having to manage a Kubernetes cluster (on servers.) If you are only exposed at the services level - whether they are provided directly by your cloud provider, and whether or not those FaaS & buckets are implemented with k8s hidden from you, then you can use 'serverless', but not if part of the requirement is to manage that k8s stack yourself - and that includes provisioning so-called FaaS on the cluster. "Serverless" it decidedly is not.

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