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Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why these platforms, which clearly run on a server, were marketed as "serverless". They seem more akin to a distributed operating system, to me

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Ultimately it's a marketing term, but it's a good one.

Of course ultimately the code runs on a server, but it's not a server that the customer has to buy, rent, maintain, or otherwise think about.

> or otherwise think about.

For us this is by far the biggest factor. Innovation tokens are the most expensive thing there is.

I think the nomenclature comes from the fact that "traditionally", before you can upload a piece of code somewhere and have it executed, you have to first setup a server, as in: an instance of a particular operating system (a physical server or a VPS), hence the name "server-ful". In the "server-less" paradigm, you upload directly to an abstract cloud and have cloud infrastructure execute your code. Moreover, uploading to "a server" implies using a fixed, pre-allocated set of CPU/memory/disk resources that cannot grow dynamically, while "server-less" implies using dynamic infrastructure that can scale CPU/memory/disk resources up and down as needed and/or clone executed code across multiple internal compute instances controlled by a load balancer and so on - the notion of "a server" becomes no longer relevant.

Firstly because you don't provision servers to run the code, the runtime will scale the infrastructure horizontally with response to traffic. Secondly because it's not a client/server architecture from the perspective of the code being run.

Basically it's "serverless" because you the developer are not doing anything with servers. You're not writing one, maintaining one, or managing the infrastructure to run one. You drop off a blob of logic to the cloud provider and they handle everything else for you, and you pay on demand.

Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) is another name for the same idea but less catchy

As a customer of serverless, you do not have to manage any servers, that is provided by the platform. Even with a platform like EKS, the customer is still responsible for selecting instance type, OS/AMI and any OS updates. With serverless, the customer doesn't worry about managing their servers, they just enqueue tasks (function invocations) and let the provider worry about right-sizing instances types, OS updates, etc.

Well of course they have to run on something. But I guess since you don't have to configure the server yourself, the marketing guys figured "out of sight, out of mind".

because the only other viable analogies were:

CGI-Bin

Mainframes

which were deeply out of fashion at the time.

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