this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Eli5 server less, even on paper...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Instead of spinning up a classical server like Apache or IIS for what you need, you just write a single function that you can bind to an endpoint and just host that - the rest is abstracted away from you.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Serverless sounds like a terrible name for this lmao.

Why not remote functions or something like that.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Marketing™️ I guess? :P

But probably because YOU don't have to fuck around with servers, for you it's just an upload of a function.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think that's the main reason, it's a good name explaining what you can expect: an environment where you don't have to worry about servers and don't need an administrator

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Why not just call it shared hosting though? It's essentially the same concept as getting a GoDaddy (or Bluegost or whatever) hosting account and uploading a PHP file lol

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Shared hosting sounds like you don't have your data stored privately and doesn't sound like less work for the company.

Don't look at the name from a technicians perspective, but from the perspective of a manager of a small startup who wants to reduce the overhead for hosting it's service as much as possible. Also serverless is not wrong per sé, it's exactly what you as the customer get.

You could spin it the same way for every other instance. Why do you call GoDaddy "shared hosting", in the end it's just a pod on a kubernetes cluster. So why don't you call it "private kubernetes pod"?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Someone else has a server and their infrastructure is set up so you can upload a zip of some executable and they'll figure out how to make it run. You don't worry about any details except your code and whatever API is require to be compatible, and they worry about hosting it, making sure it has memory, CPU time, disk space, DB, etc.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So it's essentially the same as shared web hosting, just masquerading as a new concept. 15 years ago I'd deploy PHP sites by uploading them via FTP to some free web hosting company.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yep. But you pay only for the CPU time you use and very often the only IO you can do is HTTP due to the runtime.