How much would a VPS or a rented server cost where you can boot your own OS and be the sole tenant of the SSD and don't fight with the IOPS of the other videoconverting dude using the same machine?
I hate the term "serverless". It's a misnomer to the extent that it feels like it was designed to deliberately mislead. Even vague consultant-speak like "externally provisioned infrastructure" would feel more accurate.
It seems it is only a misnomer if you are too young to remember how these types of applications used to be written. They weren't always servers. In the early days they were subprocess modules[1]. "Serverless" is a return to the subprocess model, seeing the application lose the server, or to put it another way the application is less a server.
This must be why they say programming is dead once you turn 40: You can no longer communicate with the young-ins.
> It seems it is only a misnomer if you are too young to remember how these types of applications used to be written. They weren't always servers. In the early days they were subprocess modules[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
No, it's even worse a misnomer when you are old enough to remember these days. They were CGI modules... running under a server. They were not "without a server". They didn't work without a server.
And in these days, we did have plenty of applications without any server. For instance, desktop applications using local in-process databases were very common, and plenty of what people nowadays do within their browser (connecting to a remote server on the other side of the world) was instead done using these local-only desktop applications. These applications are what could legitimately claim the moniker of "serverless". Not something which can only work when under the control of a server.
Not true at all. You can use CGI scripts from the shell just fine. And you almost certainly did to aid with testing! Per the CGI specification, communication is through environment variables, stdin, and stdout. There was not a server in the application like we saw later. Since around the mid-2000s, when CGI fell out of fashion, applications of this nature usually meant them serving on port 3000 (probably). "Serverless" sees removal of the server from the application again, moving back to a process-based concept similar to what we did when CGI was the thing to use, although the protocols may be different nowadays. It is not in reference to a specific technology like CGI, rather the broader idea.
> And in these days, we did have plenty of applications without any server.
"These types of applications", not "all applications"...
I did start dabbling in computers in the early 80s, but I think there are far more people doing that now who have no concept of what actually happens and are are often sold pups because things are given deliberately obscure and cool-sounding names. (And people who name it like that are often extremely hostile when you ask questions, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549723) Of course buyer should beware, but I still think it's not OK to do.
I'm from even before that, and it makes no sense to me.
I understand both what you say and what "serverless" commonly means, I'm just saying it's essentially arbitrary. A symbol with no etymology that holds water.
All words are arbitrary, but how does it not make sense? "Server" is a well understood term in software. "Less a X" is well understood in English to mean something akin to "without X", or "not having X". Serverless is short for "less a server", which succinctly indicates exactly what it is: The application is without a server. Which is a shift in how these types of applications are written, as since the mid-2000s it was common to include a server as part of the application. "Serverless" makes more sense than most terms we use in industry. It literally describes itself, although does require some historical context to understand why "server" is relevant.
Understandably, if you don't come from the software world you might think a server is a person who does work at your request, like serve you food at a restaurant. Is that where the problem lies? There are definitely still people, servers, serving the care to the systems that run the software. But that is clearly not the context in which it is used. It is very much used as a software term, and as a software term alone.
This might be why people are having trouble with it. "Cloud" and "serverless" both refer to hardware, not software.
"Cloud" was moving the hardware from something you managed, either in office or a datacenter, to using machines someone else managed, but it was still server-oriented (such as software in VMs or bare-metal that you managed).
"Serverless" drops even that, using ephemeral code that doesn't care what server it's running on, so the people managing the hardware can move your software as-needed.
> "Cloud" and "serverless" both refer to hardware, not software.
Not really. "Cloud" refers to a software abstraction that tries to hide the existence of actual hardware namely to remove dependence on the availability of any specific hardware component (like, as in, being able to transparently move to another physical machine without the user ever knowing). It is clearly a software term. I can't go down to my local Walmart and buy a "Cloud". Amazon won't ship a "Cloud" to my place. There is nothing "hard" implied by the word as used in this context. I'll grant you that it more or less maintains some kind of "virtual" hardware concept. Perhaps that is what you mean?
There is no hardware association with "serverless". It refers to a pattern for developing a certain breed of applications that resemble servers, but without the server. "Server" is definitively a software term as used here. A server is an application that listens for requests from a client, typically on a network port if we are to dive into implementation territory, but could be something else like a unix domain socket. Much like CGI of yore, these "serverless" applications shed the server, relying on the runtime environment to fill in the missing pieces.
There is an apocryphal story going around at my company, which in all honesty I don't believe to be true, but it's too good to not believe. :)
Back when the hype was virtualization (so probably mid-2000s, before my time at the company), a big project was run to try moving to virtual machines. After the research phase had been deemed a success, they were gearing up to go into production and put in a hardware order. This was supposedly rejected by an executive who complained that they should not need physical servers if they do everything on virtual machines now.