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by moduspwnens14 2899 days ago
> I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue

But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.

The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:"

* S3

* API Gateway

* SQS

* SNS

* Cognito

* DynamoDB

* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)

* Step Functions

In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per-node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing to use at low scale.

"Functions as a service" covers serverless compute, but it doesn't cover the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.
3 comments
brightball 2899 days ago
All of those would fall under IaaS/PaaS.

If we're qualifying anything on a server that developers don't have to manage themselves as serverless than anything with an API becomes serverless...despite all of them actually running on servers.

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moduspwnens14 2899 days ago
OK. I guess to me categorizing those things in the same bucket as EC2 or Salesforce is missing a pretty fundamental architectural difference and benefit. I'm not claiming "serverless" is an ideal term, but I haven't seen the case made for anything better.
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manigandham 2899 days ago
Those are just managed services, as in managed versions of I/P/F/S-aaS.

"Serverless" can be applied to every SaaS product ever made and is just an all-around meaningless and dumb-sounding term.

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dastbe 2899 days ago
(aws employee)

The distinction I've heard and make (regardless of serverless being the right term) is that these infrastructure services expose their control plane and data plane without tying you to the concept of a particular machine. Compare this to all publicly available forms of RDS where I still have to think in terms of machines for scaling and management.

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fgonzag 2899 days ago
None of those are "serverless"
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