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I think “serverless” doesn't actually mean no server (a distributed system, like Dat); it means “don't worry about the server; we'll take care of it for you”.

…or maybe that's “Cloud”.

Is there a clear explanation of what “serverless” means, and how it's different from “Cloud”, suitable for semi-technical non-developers?




From what I understand, "Cloud" basically means that you still have to deal with servers, whether they be VMs or physical devices, but all of the networking and loadbalancing aspects are abstracted away. "Serverless" takes it a step further and makes it so you don't even have to deal with setting up VMs, you just give the provider the code you'd normally run on a host, and they'll automatically handle all of the infrastructure stuff, like spinning up extra hosts under heavy load.


It's usually called "serverless" when the "servers" are created on demand when a request comes in, cold server start-up takes less than a second, and there's theoretically no server state between requests.

I think "stateless" is a better term.


Sure:

Serverless - "Re reimplemented/packaged a code runtime, and jerked off about marketing a bunch"

My Butt - "Run your shit on someone else's computer"

TBF, if the 'serverless' shit was sold as "run functions without needing to fiddle with an os", that's a decent selling point.

It's not server-less, tho.




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