[Sohcahtoa82]

As a security engineer, I always cringe when anything involving containers is referred to as "serverless".

I always thought that one of the advantages of going serverless was that you didn't have to worry about keeping the underlying operating system up-to-date. No needing to do a monthly "sudo apt update && apt upgrade" or whatever. But containers throw that all away when container images enter the world.

Instead of updating your operating system, you're updating your images...and it's basically the same thing.

[OJFord]

Is anyone's goal of 'serverless' that they no longer have to deal with updating the OS?

Most would say even a server-ful system (k8s, or whatever) should be considered 'cattle not pets' with immutable nodes replaced as needed anyway. No update, just replace. Just like building a new image and having new pods (or serverless whatevers) pull it.

[thakoppno]

The cattle not pets abstraction always struck me as wildly bizarre. Whoever came up with that phrase, did they grow up on a farm?

I’ve never cordoned off an individual head of cattle and lobotomized it, which is kinda what we do when debugging issues. We take the pod out of rotation, flip a bunch of configs, then give it some traffic to see the new debugging statements.

[Sohcahtoa82]

From a purely security standpoint, "updating your OS" and "updating your image" are equivalent. What matters to the security people are that you're running the latest OpenSSL that isn't vulnerable to the newest branded vulnerability.

If you're truly "serverless" by my interpretation of it, then you wouldn't care. Your cloud provider will have updated their infrastructure, and that's all that matters.

[OJFord]

Yeah I see what you're saying, that's a fair enough interpretation of it I just don't think it's the only one.

In fact almost nothing is serverless (well, the truth comes out! ;)) by that definition, since even Lambda has runtime versions to choose/upgrade, Managed-Acme has Acme versions, etc.

SES, SNS, SQS, etc. sure, but I suppose no compute, since you need libraries, and libraries have versions, and you can't have them (significantly/major versions) changing under your feet. (Or if they don't have versions they're of course destined to have known security holes.)

(Or it's not even about libraries if you want to say no you don't need libraries - it's just about having to interface with anything.)

[kuschku]

AppEngine was the original serverless platform