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by staticassertion 2883 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.

2 comments

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".

> 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.

Sure, but there have always been options for that, regardless of abstraction level.
I don't know of an abstraction that provides FaaS + Managed System other than serverless - what are you referring to?
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?
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.