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Comment by toshk | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I should dive more into it, but everytime I read a project that claims to be "serverless" I have a really hard time to understand what it actually does or solves.

What is serverless about? Is it the next big thing? Or just the new buzzword?

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"Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity. "

From Wikipedia, first result when googling. Don't be lazy.

That's not the main pitch, that's the standard dynamic cloud/container hosting claim, this is their pitch:

"Software is eating the world. Unfortunately, most businesses still can't deliver software successfully, much less do so at the pace needed to stay competitive. For those who wish to keep up, let alone lead, software delivery & operation must be radically simplified."

Just think of it as a function on demand. Call an API endpoint, a container spins up and does something, returns the result and shuts down, and you only pay for the milliseconds and RAM used in that amount of time.

I think of it as "zero ops" API endpoints. I have some serverless functions deployed on Vercel. I wrote some Typescript code, pushed it to a file in a directory called api/. Now every time I call my function endpoint, the function runs and returns my result. I don't have to provision anything or set up any ops. The serverless part takes care of spinning up whatever compute it needs, runs my code fully statelessly, and returns my result. I don't have to touch or think about scaling anything. I'm a developer who wants to spend time on features and code, and remove myself from the dev ops as much as possible. That's why I love serverless and use it whenever I can.

Thanks, still curious about data management, vendor lock in, what to do when complexity grows etc. Im sure they have all been thought off, will look into it.

Narrator voice: “It had not all been thought of.”

As for vendor lock in, I think that is one of the bigger constraints with serverless. There are a couple tools that help make the transition easier, like Serverless Framework[0], but when you get into things like AWS Dynamo DB, which seems to be there perfered DB for serverless workloads, it can get tricky. Thankfully, it seems like the format of basic serverless functions is pretty standard across different platforms, but I think the real tricky part comes from other services on the platform you use, like data persistence.

[0] https://www.serverless.com/

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