
Serverless Still Runs on Servers - joeblubaugh
https://lightstep.com/blog/serverless-still-runs-servers/
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russdpale
I figured most of us knew this by now? Abstracted server infrastructure would
be a more appropriate name, imo.

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brazzledazzle
At this point it seems like mostly pedants and literalists. I wonder what the
overlap is between “serverless still runs on servers” folks and the people
that beat the “cloud is just someone else’s servers” horse to death for years
and years. I totally understand if someone has a hard time with nuance and not
taking things literally but that’s rare. In my experience it’s just fueled by
condescension and/or this assumption that people are too stupid to breathe.

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Sohcahtoa82
I've always thought "Serverless still runs on servers" and "The cloud is just
someone else's computer" aren't just condescending and pedantic, but also
highly dismissive.

Yeah, sure, "serverless" and "cloud" are both buzzwords that reached peak buzz
a years ago (serverless being more recent), but they're actually incredibly
powerful.

Before cloud services became a thing, if you wanted to run a high capacity
service of some sort beyond something a simple shared web host could offer,
you had to either run your own data center or pay for colocation services,
neither of which were cheap or quick to set up. Scaling up and down to handle
peaks during specific times of day simply wasn't a thing. If you were
launching something new, you had to take a guess on how much processing power
you'd need. If you guessed too low, you potentially lost customers as they got
frustrated and left while you worked on scaling up. If you guessed too high,
you wasted a lot of money. The ability to quickly scale your infrastructure up
and down in minutes or even seconds is HUGE.

The ramifications of serverless are equally large, because now you don't even
need to consider your scaling at all, not to mention patching your operating
system and other software. All that matters is your code. Throw your static
files in S3 and let AWS handle the distribution, rather than having to spin up
an EC2 instance and keeping nginx up to date.

Snubbing technology just because you have some pedantic reason to hate the
name is just silly and gets in the way of discussion of the merits of the
technology.

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Endy
See, I use the "There is no cloud, only another person's computer" comment as
a lesson to both my students and less tech-savvy friends - for privacy
reasons. It may be an incredibly powerful computer, but the core issue is,
it's someone else's. You can't control what they do with it, and you certainly
shouldn't trust them to have your best interest in mind. I don't care what
buzzword you use. If data is stored remotely, it's not secure because the one
storing & hosting it can choose to see it.

Good way to teach kids how to be properly paranoid on the Internet and the
Web.

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manquer
It is also someone else's OS, software and hardware and compiler
(Thompson,'84) even if you "own" the specific license or a copy . Physical
"ownership" is very arbitrary line to draw i if you are paranoid about this
kind of thing , Storage does not equate able to see if you control the
encryption keys

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Endy
It is, and I wish I was capable of having it otherwise. I merely lack the
necessary skills and equipment. There's a much lower skill hurdle to setting
up your own server than there is to writing your own OS from binary up.

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kylnew
The question really isn’t about whether serverless runs on servers or not.
It’s about whether the workflow still feels like dealing with your own servers
or not. In some ways, yes it still feels like that and in other ways, such as
scaling up and load balancing, it doesn’t as much.

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jordiburgos
Obviously...

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boksiora
Are you sure it runs on servers? I thought it runs in the cloud

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niceperson
lol!

