[unnouinceput]

"Serverless"...this word is so thrown around nowadays that it lost its original meaning. Same way the phrase "we're like a family" transitioned from a beloved one in 50's to its thrown away in 90's meaningless all the way to today be considered a red flag when you hear such a word at a hiring interview, the "serverless" word is in its late 90's nowadays. One decade and will become just another red flag.

[mborch]

The meaning is pretty clear: you don't manage compute, it scales up elastically based on demand, even all the way to zero. Ideally, it reacts quickly enough to changes in demand that you don't need to worry about it. Serverless is basically the original promise of the cloud.

[Dunedan]

It's not as clear as you think, because companies are watering it down. Just have a look what "serverless"-branded services AWS published the past years.

Take "OpenSearch Serverless" for example: They claim "you only pay for the resources consumed by the workload", but even if you have an OpenSearch Serverless collection you don't use, you pay at least ~$690/month (and that's not even accounting for stored data)!

https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/pricing/

[thinkharderdev]

What was the original meaning? When I hear "serverless" I think basically:

1. I don't have to think about or manage any servers

2. Usage is metered at a very fine-grained level (per X requests to the API/per GB of data/etc)

3. No fixed cost. You only pay for usage.

Was there a different meaning originally?

[unnouinceput]

Distributed apps. No central server involved. Peer to peer is one. Or each app is a server too and the information propagates in ripple like style. You connect to me, we sync, then another connects to me and this way the info that only you had now he has it too (and me of course). That's the original serverless idea. Not this walled garden crap with "cloud". Cloud is just a computer that is not yours and anything you put in there it's no longer just yours (or in most cases when you lose the account is no longer yours, period! - HN has plenty of horror stories from Google, Amazon, Microsoft that shit on people and call it rain).

[lmm]

> Distributed apps. No central server involved. Peer to peer is one. Or each app is a server too and the information propagates in ripple like style. You connect to me, we sync, then another connects to me and this way the info that only you had now he has it too (and me of course). That's the original serverless idea.

I don't remember those ever being called "serverless". Certainly "peer to peer" or "distributed" have a lot more traction.