[9rx]

In software, a server refers to an application that listens for requests from a client.

If you remember the olden days of web development, when CGI was king, the web applications didn't listen. Instead, a separate web server (e.g. Apache) called upon the application as a subprocess and communicated with it using system primitives like environment variables, stdin, and stdout.

Over time, we started moving away from the CGI model, moving the server process into the application itself. While often a fronting web server (e.g. nginx) would proxy the requests to the application, technically the application was able to stand on its own.

Serverless returns to the old CGI model, although not necessarily using the CGI protocol anymore, removing the server from the application. The application is less a server, hence the name.