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> The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved.

So it's a meaningless buzzword. Got it.




Recently I've been fascinated with software architectures that shift the locus of control back to the client, instead of the server/cloud.

So seeing "serverless" in the title caught my attention, only to find that it too looked like just another buzzword..


Agreed, I was thinking workloads being divided up and sent to clients for distributed processing which relieves workload and servers, not "u shuld host ur site in teh CLOUD LOL!!" What garbage.

It's nice that web applications are starting to pick up on this concept. Browsers are advanced enough that the entire front-end can be run 100% in the browser, which shifts a good portion of the app that used to have to be scaled from server to the client. That way you can focus on scaling your API. This split I've noticed also tends to make client-side web apps more responsive (even if it's just an illusion), which people appreciate.


Yep. This really is a wasted occasion, I'd have been really interested in how to build application-specific or generic P2P networks to do that kind of stuff, at the smaller or the wider scale.


It's abstracting above having to manage and think about servers. Just as most developers stopped having to think about registers or print drivers or low-level network protocols or memory pages. You still have all these but you gain big by having technologies that let you abstract away from these levels of detail. Buzzwordy, yeah sure. But the meaning and implications are pretty powerful.


Except it doesn't really. You still have to deal with the important things. All that's removed is the tediousness of the physical server maintenance. You still need to architect for redundancy, deal with latency, client/server caching, etc. Your app cares just as much about the server as it always did and your server-side code needs to be as robust as if it were running on dedicated hardware (perhaps more robust).

And as wmf pointed out, we already have plenty of buzzwords for this. PaaS, IaaS, "Cloud computing", etc.


But we already have a name for that: PaaS.




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