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by manigandham 2878 days ago
Because it should really just be called Functions-as-a-service, and they are great for single-focus reactive/connective processing and 1-off tasks but are not a replacement for everything as people try to use it for.
2 comments
k__ 2878 days ago
As far as I know, serverless isn't just FaaS. As you pointed out FaaS is to connect things, nothing more.

For me serverless is pay-as-you go pricing, no over- or under-provisioning and last but not least, no server-management.

Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AppSync, Device Farm, Aurora, etc. are all serverless.

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castlecrasher2 2878 days ago
> Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AppSync, Device Farm, Aurora, etc. are all serverless.

Yep. Lambda may be functions-as-a-service, which is a great name for it, but the whole shebang is more than that. Thus, serverless.

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detaro 2878 days ago
How would you distinguish it from "PaaS"?
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k__ 2878 days ago
The "serverless" model frees you of more tasks than PaaS, like capacity planning and scaling, also it's more flexible and fault tolerant.
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staticassertion 2878 days ago
Why shouldn't it be called serverless?

As a consumer, I essentially get to treat it as such - there is no server I need to manage.

In AWS-land this is a big differentiator over a system I have to manage, such as EC2, that just executes containers (meeting FAAS). Now I have FAAS and I don’t have to manage the infra, which is huge because AWS will be far better at meeting a patching SLA than I will be.

Yes, obviously there is a “server”, but I don’t have to think about it.

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manigandham 2878 days ago
No server to manage is the least important part of it all. It should describe the abstraction that's actually being offered: IaaS is servers, PaaS is a single app, FaaS is individual function, SaaS is just software.

Any of those other than IaaS itself can be "serverless".

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staticassertion 2878 days ago
> No server to manage is the least important part of it all.

OK, well it's the most important part for me. I don't want to manage patching a box.

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manigandham 2878 days ago
Sure, but there have always been options for that, regardless of abstraction level.
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staticassertion 2877 days ago
I don't know of an abstraction that provides FaaS + Managed System other than serverless - what are you referring to?
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detaro 2878 days ago
We called that "PaaS" for years, why does it need a new name suddenly? Especially a new name that can cause confusion with things that actually do not have a dedicated server?
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staticassertion 2878 days ago
I think PaaS is overly broad.

And yes, marketing is a real thing, and names are also picked because they sound cool. There are worse things.

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