sbarski

> It's interesting by the way that you keep using product names "Lambda", "API Gateway" which aren't concepts but Amazon products. That's marketing. It's like calling all social networks "Facebooks". "Serverless" is a marketing device to sell Amazon services, I think people get it by now.

Amazon is a leader in this area right now but let's not use them. We can talk about Microsoft, IBM, or Google. They use "serverless" to describe their products. Google calls cloud functions a "serverless platform" and "serverless microservices" (https://cloud.google.com/functions/).

Azure functions talk about "processing events with serverless code" and so on. I only meant to use Amazon is an example because people are more familiar with their products.

Serverless is just a descriptor for these kinds of technologies and patterns.

I think we might be thinking about Serverless slightly differently. To me serverless is not just AWS Lambda. It's a broader theme that encompasses Function-as-a-Service technologies like Lambda and Backend-as-a-Service technologies like Firebase & Auth0.

Combining FaaS, BaaS, and using certain techniques and patterns is what makes Serverless. As a developer I am plenty aware that there are servers - I don't feel that there is any voodoo or black magic. However, when someone says that they have a serverless system I immediately understand what they are trying to say. They are saying that they don't need to manage, provision, scale, and look after servers. Honestly, the world "serverless" is a lot less confusing than "cloud".

I am not sure what you mean by "there is still a server fronting the whole thing". You don't need to scale the API Gateway yourself (again it's a managed service). Same goes for Azure functions, Google Cloud Functions and OpenWhisk as they all have HTTP listeners built in.

I understand where your thinking is coming from. There was this article that tried to address it: https://serverless.zone/serverless-is-just-a-name-we-could-h...

Edit: fixed sentence structure.

I am sure people have said this but it's "serverless" from the perspective of the user (who is a developer in this case). The developer doesn't have to deal with servers/infrastructure so for them the system is serverless.

I guess it's like wireless... Something could be wireless from the perspective of the end user but there are still wires actually there.

I honestly think that serverless is a lot less ambiguous and misleading than something like "cloud" which is completely abstract.

Interesting. Will keep an eye on this.

And for all those who disagree with "Serverless", come to Serverlessconf London (london.serverlessconf.io) and we can debate it there. In fact, would love to see everyone there!

One of my favourite ACM articles. I think I read it twice the first time I came across it. Also bought "The Design of Design" thanks to it.

Brilliant article. I only wish I'd read it 10 years ago...

Congrats to Ryan! Nice work!!

Great points.

We have dedicated many pages (and will dedicate more) explaining how/why serverless is different. Why we think it's superior (in some instances) to traditional technologies and how it can alleviate the burden that comes with managing traditional infrastructure (and current methods of implementing back ends for web applications).

The book is covering AWS and technologies such as Lambda, and API Gateway. These have already evolved as we began to write the book. I want to focus more on patterns and applications but we also need to introduce readers to these patterns and show how to actually put them together - so it's an interesting question of finding balance.

Excellent idea. Thoughts on best practice and real-life success stories can really illustrate a point. We can definitely dedicate space to that.

Hey everyone, in a nutshell, my co-founder and I launched a startup we’ve been working on for about a year. It is a cloud-based exception monitoring service for ASP.NET and/or JavaScript. We plan on adding support for Ruby and Python very soon.

We have a few features that other competing services do not have. We are also proud of our UI (and the overall usability) to which we gave a lot of love.

We think that our service is useful and we have been using it to find and fix bugs in our other projects.

What are your thoughts? Advice? Criticism?

Edit: Appfail was in beta for a while and I've asked for advice before. We are now out of beta and with a host of new features. Looking forward to any feedback!

Woah! Nice work...

Thank you yashchandra! :)

We will definitely aim to support Rails in the near future. That's on our to-do list for the next major release.

In terms of plans and pricing what you see are our indicative plans. We are still in beta so our current plan is free.

Depending on feedback we might tweak the pricing a bit (we do want our users to receive great value for money) but my expectation is that we will stay close to the plans we have right now.

Thank you for your reply! We worked hard on the UI/UX so I am glad that you like it.

To answer your points:

1. Yes - you are right that we need to make it clearer how integration works. We are working on a page right now which explains everything in detail. Hopefully it should go up within a few hours.

2. We are .NET developers so targeting ASP.NET seemed natural but we definitely have plans to target ruby, python, node, php, java, etc.... We are going to open source the integration module and allow others to build new ones in different languages. It would be amazing if we got some help from the community with this.

Thanks again!

It does indeed look very good. Nice design and a good concept to boot.

I hope it does well.

If you read the last paragraph in our T&C you will see that we do not assert any ownership over your content (story). It still belongs to you and you can do with it whatever you like.

What we want, however, is to be able to use user-submitted content for any possible advertising or promotion purposes. This is kind of what facebook does except not as evil. We reckon that the user will benefit from this too (as it will show off his story to more people if we link to it in an ad).

We will make all of that clearer in our T&C. Thank you!

You are right. Writing is a lengthy and demanding process.

We do need to market this properly and find people who are interested in writing stories.

Going by the amount of blogs/literary sites and forums that are out there - we reckon that these people do exist in certain numbers. We just have to find find and convince them that our platform is right for them.

Good point. Thank you!

My friend and I have been developing a brand spanking new site for avid readers and writers. It is called Slap a Story and as of today can be accessed at slapastory.com.

In short you can post short stories and make them popular by voting them up, you can also discuss stories written by other people.

Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.