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What Serverless Is — And Why It’s A Mistake
I published a piece titled Why Serverless Is A Scam and this one completely blew up. I was quite surprised by it. Maybe in hindsight I shouldn’t have been too surprised. This post was correcting some assumptions I made in a previous post, A Eulogy For Serverless. In that post I had assumed that people understood that serverless was a scam already and people were moving away from it in record numbers. Guess not.
But it looks like I may have made a similar mistake in that post as well. I assumed that everyone understood serverless. If you look at the comments, though, well:
You seem to be conflating cloud “in general” with “serverless”. Which do you mean? What is your magical VPS running on
Sorry, have to agree with most of the comments here — you’re confusing serverless with cloud. Related but different. You can run on cloud w/o any serverless infrastructure.
You repeatedly conflate serverless with cloud to attempt to reinforce your opinion.
Now first I have to admit ‘serverless’ is a pretty poor name. If you think serverless you think no servers. That’s not what it is at all, you have to host your code somewhere.
What serverless actually means is you don’t have to micromanage servers. This is opposed to something like a VPS where you have control over the entire (virtual) server.
In fact I’d argue a better term is ‘managed server computing’, that is the underlying server is managed for you and you can focus on building your own application. The only problem is that ‘serverless’ implies a much higher level of management and in most cases you cannot access the underlying server at all. So maybe something like ‘fully managed and abstracted server computing’ or simply ‘abstract server computing’… ASC I like it. Just don’t get it confused with ascending in SQL.
Although it’s still not 100% a perfect definition and the term ‘serverless’ is a bit poorly defined. Many serverless providers allow you to specify a location to deploy. And many serverless offerings allow you to specify CPU, memory, and storage. One heuristic that works most of the time is the presence of a remote shell, or a shell in general. No SSH access -> serverless, SSH access -> servers. However this doesn’t…
