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by abadpoli 658 days ago
Can we not do this? Everyone knows that “serverless” doesn’t actually mean there are no servers. It’s not productive to do this “haha gotcha!” trope every time someone uses the serverless term.

Serverless refers to the fact that you can launch individual workloads on the platform while abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. Yes, to set up dokku you still need to provision a server. But to deploy an application onto dokku after it’s been set up, you do that without worrying about provisioning new infra for your app. That’s what is “serverless” about it, and it’s a perfectly acceptable use of the term.
2 comments
turtlebits 658 days ago
"Serverless" means 1- pay for what you use. 2- No infra setup, ever. Dokku requires a server that you have to manage. It is not serverless. You should never hit a scaling wall.
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rahkiin 658 days ago
Azure Functions are serverless to us, but for the team developing and deploying that feature they are not serverless. Dokku provides a tool so that once you deploy projects they can be ‘serverless’.
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joseda-hg 658 days ago
1- That would throw out serverless with (free) unlimited use (A la PocketHost)

2- Then getting a third party to set up Dokku and then using that would qualify (Because it'd be the same as getting AWS to setup their server abstraction) The platform is serverless, you hosting it probably not, maybe server-light, as you setup the abstraction and use that for many apps

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bigstrat2003 658 days ago
> Can we not do this? Everyone knows that “serverless” doesn’t actually mean there are no servers.

Then maybe people shouldn't use a term that means "there are no servers". One doesn't get to complain if they use a word to mean something the opposite of its actual meaning, and then people don't like it.

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hashmush 658 days ago
The actual meaning of words is defined by how people use them. Serverless has a very specific, well-defined meaning despite its seemingly contradictory etymology.
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IshKebab 658 days ago
Are you the sort of person that says "ackshewelly people in orbit aren't weightless" or complains that wireless headphones technically contain wires, or that motionless rocks are actually moving really fast because the Earth is moving through space...

It's just annoying.

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