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by sarcasmic 2723 days ago
Well, the people who dismissed the term 'serverless' early on as trite, misleading, and vague were proven right: these days it's a cloudy notion about something loosely cloud-related, such that posts like need to exist that can clarifying all the possible meanings with one-liners using real terms of art; yet the term clearly has cachet with technical-ish and nontechnical decision-makers as a Solution that unlocks Value and other more-good-than-bad outcomes that are bullet-shaped and made out of silver.

Players who jump on the term train are complicit in milking the confusion of people for gain. And that's perhaps much of the reason why we haven't unlocked the concept's value. To move forward, it would be useful to clear the air at the start, but the direction that consultants, customers, cloud providers, and developers will take the message is far from certain.
2 comments
keithwhor 2723 days ago
You are right. I anticipate terms like “fully managed compute” may become more descriptive for FaaS offerings (Netlify Functions and ilk), and I’m not really sure what to make of where people will take k8s / on-prem FaaS / data layer offerings (Aurora).

Edit: I will say, the term “serverless” itself is certainly sticky and will continue to grow into a larger catch-all term for managed compute innovations over the next few years or more. I think it’s also likely that, from a sales perspective, the term falls out of favor for more specific (and descriptive) types of offerings that all fall under the serverless umbrella — which is pretty much what this article addresses.

Don’t be surprised to see different types of conferences that move away from the “serverless” branding itself as the space continues to grow.

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throwaway98121 2723 days ago
No offense but this comment is very pretentious. I think you’re trying to say you don’t like the term serverless itself. Your writing, on the other hand, tries really hard to sound intelligent and takes 2 paragraphs to state something you could have stated in less than a sentence.
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keithwhor 2723 days ago
... an ad hominem argument from a throwaway account probably supports the OP’s point, for what it’s worth. I’m not sure you achieved the intended goal here, or what that goal was.
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