[9rx]

> Serverless computing is an application development model

Exactly. And how that development model differs from the traditional approach is that you don't have to implement a server. Deployment isn't a development model. The development is necessarily done by the time you get there.

> But AWS also uses the term for other things

The terms has expended to be used for all kinds of different things, sure. There is probably a toaster out there somewhere solid as being "Serverless" nowadays.

If we really want to get into the thick of it, "serverless" seems to go back much further, used to refer to certain P2P systems. But we know from context that isn't what we're talking about. Given the context, it is clear we are talking about "serverless" as it emerged out of Lamba, referring to systems that were CGI-esq in nature.

[jchw]

It's funny how you added that part even though Amazon's own description continues in a completely different way that doesn't emphasize this at all. That's not a mistake on Amazon's part; it's not that they forgot to mention it. The reason why it's not there is because it's not actually the point.

You're reading "application development model" and thinking "Exactly! It's all about the request handling model!" but that's not what Amazon said or meant. Consider the description of Amazon Fargate, a service that in fact can be used to run regular old web servers:

> AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers.

I guess the next argument is that Amazon is just diluting the term and originally it meant what you think it meant, and that is the terminal state of this debate since there is no more productive things to say.

Edit: you added more but it's just more attempting to justify away things that are plainly evident... But I can't help myself. This is just non-sense:

> Deployment isn't a development model,

Software development is not just writing code.

[9rx]

> Software development is not just writing code.

But it remains that deployment is normally considered to be independent of development. If you put your binaries on a CD instead of sending it to AWS, the application will still be considered developed by most people. Deployment is a post-development activity.

> I guess the next argument is that Amazon is just diluting the term

Could be. Would it matter? The specific definition you offer didn't even emerge until ~2023, nearly a decade after Lamba was introduced, so clearly they're not hung up on some kind of definitional purity. Services like Cloud Run figured out that you could keep the server in the application, while still exhibiting the spirit of CGI, so it is not like it is hard technical requirement, but it is the technical solution that originally emerged and was named as such.

If what you are trying to say, and not conveying it well, is that it has become a marketing term for all kinds of different things, you're not wrong. Like I suggested in another comment, there is probably a "Serverless" toaster for sale out there somewhere these days.