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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

I tried to understand what is "Wasmer Edge" but couldn't. They say on the front page "Make any app serverless. The cheapest, fastest and most scalable way to deploy is on the edge." and it seems like I can upload the source code of any app and they will convert it for me? Unlikely so.

Also it says "Pay CDN-like costs for your cloud applications – that’s Wasmer Edge." and I don't understand why I need to pay for the cloud if the app is serverless. That's exactly the point of serverless app that you don't need to pay for the servers because, well, the name implies that there is no server.

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Confusingly, "Serverless" doesn't mean there's no server. It means that you don't have to manage a server yourself.

My preferred definition of serverless is scale-to-zero - where if your app isn't getting any traffic you pay nothing (as opposed to paying a constant fee for having your own server running that's not actually doing any work), then you pay more as the traffic scales up.

Frustratingly there are some "serverless" offerings out there which DO charge you even for no traffic - "Amazon Aurora Serverless v1" did that, I believe they fixed it in v2.

Then it should be called manageless?

Still confusing, since infrastructure you don't have to manage yourself is sometimes called "managed". It makes sense from the perspective of "you are paying us to manage this for you".

It's a terrible name, but it's been around for over a decade now so we're stuck with it.

I mostly choose not to use it, because I don't like using ambiguous terminology if I can be more specific instead. So I'll say things like "scale-to-zero".

Scale to zero covers a lot of turf from AWS Lambda to CDNs to Fargate to DO app platform.

these are just automanaged cloud servers, I guess?

Back in the day it was called PHP. You uploaded a PHP file. No server to manage. Nothing else to do!

Thanks for the feedback.

Normally, if you want to run your apps serverlessly you'll need to adapt your source code to it (both AWS Lambda and Cloudflare Workders require creating a custom HTTP handler).

In our case, you can run your normal server (lets say uvicorn) without any code changes required from our side.

Of course, you can already do this in Docker-enabled workloads: Google Cloud or Fly.io, for example. But that means that your apps will have long cold-start times at a way higher cost (no serverless).

Hope this makes things clear!

Thank you for the explanation, now I can better see the differences between "serverless" platforms although I am still a little disappointed that so called "serverless" apps still require a (paid) server despite the name.

This bugs me all the time. Ethernet is serverless. Minesweeper is serverless. AWS Lambda is quite serverful, you're just not allowed to get a shell on that server.

I believe "serverless" in this sense means "like AWS lambda". Theoretically you upload some small scripts and they're executed on-demand out of a big resource pool, rather than you paying for/running an entire server yourself.

It seems like a horrible way to build a system with any significant level of complexity, but idk maybe it makes sense for very rarely used and light routes?

"Serverless" means Function-as-a-service, think of it like CGI-bin scripts but you pay per execution.

I'm kinda confused as to the licensing on this. Can I use this as a sandboxed python for random (non-web) projects like I would pydiode?

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