Of course there are servers out in the cloud somewhere. But you're not renting them 24/7.
I'd love to experiment with a completely server-free P2P system, perhaps using WebRTC and WebTorrent (although in that case, there are still some servers involved).
"Serverless" is the trendy term that the community is describing this particular architecture
Describing it extremely poorly, quite frankly. Also - this project is not just consuming resources from the totally not server based resources it inherently relies on, a key component of it runs on those totally not servers.
After reading a little on the pages you linked to, "Server-less" is just a 'cute' way to say "our app is vendor-locked to AWS and their Lambda/API gateway/hosted DB/hosted storage/etc services"
> Of course there are servers out in the cloud somewhere.
Trying to explain a trendy mis-used term with another trendy mis-used term doest't help your case.
Have you ever heard the phrase "there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer"?
> But you're not renting them 24/7.
So, any application where the server-side component is scaled up-and-down dynamically, based on some kind of workload based schedule, is server-less?
Yes, it's a service that uses its servers to run your code. Just like how most of us have somebody else run our email for us. There is still a mail server sitting out there somewhere masquerading for our domains, but we don't run mail servers. Now there is a service that is running my node code for me.
Well, it's the first time I've come across this usage of the term. It's pretty misleading when there are serverless technologies around, e.g. P2P networks which don't make a client/server distinction, JS applications which can run from a local HTML file, etc.
Okay, let's try another analogy. Let's say I don't own a car. Or lease. Or rent. Or borrow. That makes me "carless", right?
Moving on: I only take taxis or Lyft or whatever to get to my destinations. That would still make me "carless", right? I don't manage the fleet of cars on call for me. I don't have to worry about their maintenance. I am not responsible for a car, so I am carless.
Claiming that the comments are "serverless" is the equivalent of claiming that the ride is "carless".
You, the person being driven around, can be "carless" and you, as a site owner, can be "serverless". For the ride to be "carless", it would have to not involve a car. For the comments to be "serverless", it would have to not involve a server. This system involves a ton of different servers, so it can't be "serverless".
"I don't have to deal with managing servers because I'm paying for a service which abstracts the underlying servers" has been the value proposition of PaaS systems from day one. It doesn't make them "serverless", which is a silly new empty buzzword.
Why do you feel the need for yet another marketing buzzword ? IMHO saying that makes one sound like an someone that don't know what a server is, but maybe it's just me. Just because you're not managing a server doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it obviously does, the code isn't running on each client but remotely.
> Just because you're not managing a server doesn't mean it doesn't exist
Wireless internet is still connected to the rest of the internet via a wire somewhere; the obvious point being made is that your phone or laptop doesn't need a wire. Serverless here doesn't mean that servers no longer exist, but that you are not working at the server level to accomplish what you're trying to do.
Wireless is accurate for handsets, since you're not using a wire to exchange data, the communication is wireless.
Serverless is totally inaccurate for scripts uploaded ON a server. Since they are executed on a server. The scripts are executed and its result are potentially served from A SERVER. The fact that you don't manage it yourself doesn't change that.
That's an horrible example you are using to try to make your point, it just doesn't work.
Understood, but that means that Rails has been serverless almost forever because of Heroku. The console is simpler than the one of AWS and you deploy with git push. You didn't have to worry about the db because you only had PostgreSQL for a long time. And you could buy add on services to do almost everything. It just happened before the buzzword was born.
> Wireless internet is still connected to the rest of the internet via a wire somewhere
Wireless refers to a specific component of the connection - the the connection between your device and the relevant wireless base station.
No one technical is claiming "wireless internet" - and if they are, they're as guilty as the server-less crowd - they're claiming a wireless local area network (wifi), or wireless wide area network (3g/4g/WiMax, etc) - they're not inherently "the internet" they're just a radio based method for transferring packets of data.
Here, you have developers literally uploading the code they've written ( the javascript code that runs on AWS' 'lambda' service ), configuring 5 separate rented services and then claiming "look ma, no server".
We don't choose the buzzwords - the market (or marketing people) do so. The word has already been chosen - "serverless". I agree there could have been a better word that didn't clash with our knowledge that there are still servers involved.
After someone posted links, I went and did 30 seconds of cursory reading.
The three referenced pages are:
Server-less conf - a conference about building apps on AWS lambda
Serverless blog - a blog about building apps on AWS lambda
Serverless framework - a framework for building apps on AWS lambda.
Every single "server-less" thing I can find, comes back to "using AWS Lambda". Which then makes me wonder why the need for a buzzword like "Server-less" - it's not like it's trying to describe a range of approaches and technologies (like say Web 2.0 was doing).
Ohhh of course. How stupid of me. It's deliberately vague and non-specific. You can sell a client on "we use a server-less architecture" because they think it means literally that - no servers, just computer guy magic. Is it as easy to sell a client on "we built the app to rely completely on 5 different services from a single company that has a history of anti-competitive behaviour"? I doubt it.
I see it all the time now when referring to Lambda or Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions. I'd claim, in fact, that there is no other one buzzword which is currently used.
It's a straw man to assume that "serverless" refers to physical servers. The argument is triggering my irony detector, since that usage is itself a marketing category so broad as to be meaningless. Only in the client-server model does "server" have a definition worth reasoning about, where "server" refers to the passive listening endpoint in that model.
Lambda's published reference architecture is asynchronous invocation via queues listening to pub/sub events, which in integration terms is the antithesis of the client-server model. There is no listening server in the client-server sense.
So whilst the term "serverless" has obviously been chosen as a catchy marketing term for the mouthful that is "asynchronous event-driven self-scaling platform-as-a-service", it's not wrong.
> Just because you're not managing a server doesn't mean it doesn't exist
Of course that's true, but "serverless" implies that you don't have to care about the "server" part of your application -- that is the stuff that isn't related to solving your problem and you probably don't care about anyway.
I like the term as it embodies what PaaS is supposed to be about: not paying a set fee per month for a server that you only use a couple of hours here an there but rather on a usage basis.
"Shared" web hosting services haven't needed patching or maintenance from the developer since the mid 90s. Is that server less?
Hell, think about companies where infra is managed by a dedicated team of skilled experts. The developers there aren't patching or maintaining the servers.
It's also not "serverless" as the repo readme claims.