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Serverless includes other things like google app engine and Heroku.


I haven't heard of those being called serverless. Those are more PaaS I guess.


It’s a spectrum and the boundaries are unclear. By this definition https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/serverless/glossary/serv... they are more serverless than PaaS imo.

Either way, serverless is a superset of FaaS.


He could have meant that it’s an ambiguous term that could apply to other platforms.


Firebase seems more fitting for "serverless" than those


Does it? I always just considered those IaaS and thought "serverless" basically meant AWS Lambda or any comparable service (for which I agree FaaS is quite apt).


GAE and Heroku are considered PaaS - Platforms as a Service


I think they are more serverless than PaaS by this definition. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/serverless/glossary/serv...


Cloudflare usually puts out good info but this is really bad marketing material stretched way too far to make a point, because they have their Workers platform and want to ride the "serverless" hype train.

Everything mentioned in that diagram is completely arbitrary and varies for every single vendor.


What’s a good definition of serverless in your opinion?


Serverless doesn't have a good definition because it's not a real concept.

At most lambda/workers/functions are really just PaaS, except instead of uploading all of your code, it's just a single file with a single endpoint.

If we really need a new term, then micro-paas or FaaS works fine, although most FaaS vendors are expanding to running any arbitrary container with multiple endpoints, so we're right back to normal (but modern) PaaS at the end.


Okay, sure. But from their own websites:

Deploy and run apps on today's most innovative Platform as a Service [1]

Google App Engine is GCP's platform as a service (PaaS). [2]

[1] https://www.heroku.com/platform

[2] https://cloud.google.com/docs/overview/cloud-platform-servic...




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