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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Serverless by AWS standards doesn’t mean “stateless”. It means that you don’t have to deal with the underlying servers and worry about scaling them up and scaling them down.

Classic Aurora for instance is not “stateless”. You still have to appropriately size the underlying server, you pay for it whether you are using it or not, you might need to reboot it, etc.

DynamoDB on the other hand is considered Serverless by AWS because you don’t size the “DynamoDB server”, and it can scale write and read capacity automatically.

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Sure. I didn't find the detail of how this is like Aurora...called from Lambda, not implemented in Lambda. Asking for that. Why is "Lambda" in the name?

Amazon borrowed the lambda name for serverless (derived from lambda/anonymous functions)...not the other way around.

Right, I get that nuance. I don't think it's involved in this case.

Serverless by AWS standards doesn’t mean “stateless”"

Willing to be proved wrong, but what I've seen so far does equate serverless with stateless, at least at the compute tier. Aurora has no "Lambda" or "serverless" branding, right? Any stateful stuff is sort of called out as an integration.

Fargate is serverless and has several varieties of support for stateful workloads.

There is an AWS Aurora serverless now: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/building-ser...

There is regular Aurora where you are responsible for sizing the servers and it doesn’t scale dynamically.

And there is Serverless Aurora

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

Also here there are many stareful serverless products:

https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/

It’s more about compute than storage.

You can now have stateful storage attached to AWS Fargate - serverless Docker. By attaching your containers to EFS.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/aws-adds-direct-sto...

Not sure I get the difference. This is sort of the core issue. At some point, some service is stateful. Why all the hoopla and nuance around naming? What, exactly, is new from the 1960's on? Stateful and stateless is as old as computing.

It’s not the data it’s the compute. In the 60s, you couldn’t just bring in an IBM mainframe when you needed it and not pay for it when you didn’t based on the server load.

With regular Aurora, whether you are using it or not, you’re always paying for both the server and the storage and you have to provision the server for peak workload. With Aurora Serverless, if you don’t connect to the database, you only pay for storage.

With lambda and to a lesser extent Fargate, you don’t pay for the underlying server at all until you actually need to run something and then with lambda you can scale up to as many instances as your account allows (a soft limit you can ask for more anytime) and pay nothing when you don’t.

With EC2 you have a server sitting there listening for events whether or not anything is sending you an event.

Interesting example. Mainframes were one of the first to deploy lots of capacity to your data center floor you hadn't yet paid for. Upgrades were often just a phone call and a remote (often, zero down time) re-config.

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