[fergie]

Two observations:

- "serverless" is a really bad name for these systems. As is often commented, some variation of "somebody-elses-server" would be better.

- Cost wasn't mentioned in the article, but the cost of renting databases and search-indices is still really high, even though these technologies are no longer the new hotness.

[amelius]

Serverless means you have a network cable that ends somewhere abruptly. The open-end will cause reflections, so you can use this technology to store data for brief moments.

[vbezhenar]

My opinion is that serverless means you don't have to deal with servers (physical or virtual). You deal with higher-level entities. You don't install Ubuntu, you just provision database from web UI or terraform script. Hardware, OS and some software is managed for you. This allows consumer to deal with less complexity and this allows provider to be more flexible with resource allocations.

[_w1tm]

Does that mean Kubernetes is serverless? Especially something like GKE autopilot?

[vasco]

Cost is one of the core premises of the article:

> Top tier SaaS services like S3 are able to deliver amazing simplicity, reliability, durability, scalability, and low price because their technologies are structurally oriented to deliver those things

The whole point is to explore how to drive cost down (due to higher efficiencies in sharing resources) by having multi tenant approach from the get-go.

The point isn't to compare to running your own database on your own rack. It's to compare single tenant RDS with something like an S3-like multi tenant postgres for example.

[alternatex]

All cloud hosting is "somebody-elses-server". Serverless is more like "pay-per-function-call" in which case Azure Functions has a pretty appropriate name.

Also, the cost of renting databases has nothing to do with newness. Databases have evolved a lot in the past two decades. They do all sorts of stuff under the hood, which is why they can now often consume massive amounts of RAM. That doesn't come for free.

[javaunsafe2019]

Did you knownthode functions are executed on containers which, in the end, are tiny server. It’s all just some marketing and printing out you don’t have to deal with the management of the containers just the configuration if you like to have some hot loaded lambdas etc

[pluto_modadic]

it messes with googling "without servers" (when I mean peer to peer, non-scam systems),

or when I mean "without a public IPv4" (as in, without a server), like offline-first (which is still /eventually connected to a server/ smh)

FNaaS != "without servers" so much as "reducing the amount of the pizza shop you run yourself" like that diagram of homemade pizza at home, frozen pizza boxes, papa johns, pizza delivery, pizza shop owner...

It's kinda an overloaded term like how cryptography gets abused by web3 scams. There's an entire row of books on computer science at a college library, one book case is on security, one shelf in that case is on cryptography, most of those books are RSA, two are EC, and one is on essoteric cryptography like dining cryptographers, blind signing, ZKP, etc - and I worry the new books will be aaaaaaaaall blockchain and DAO instead of... Tor V3 papers, or Veilid, or Vuvuzella, or Cwtch/fuzzytokens,

[maybedks]

Serverless and managed basically mean the same thing?

[Cthulhu_]

Eh, you can get upset about the industry using inaccurate words but we'd be here for a while then. AI isn't AI but machine learning, cryptocurrency isn't a currency, cloud servers aren't actually floating water vapor, the Dutch political parties that have freedom and/or democracy in their names aren't actually for freedom or democracy, and serverless actually uses servers. Let it go, just use the accepted term so that everyone knows what you mean, but remain aware of what it really means and don't buy into the hype or the FUD.

[_w1tm]

> Let it go, just use the accepted term so that everyone knows what you mean

What does it mean though?

[pdpi]

EC2, k8s, etc all abstract the hardware away, but they still use the server as a core abstraction. Serverless does away with that abstraction entirely. It’s obviously nonsense from a low-level point of view (as you say: one of many classes of “somebody else’s server” products), but, as far as developer experience goes, it’s pretty accurate.