this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
663 points (97.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
32490 readers
534 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Eli5 server less, even on paper...
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.
Serverless sounds like a terrible name for this lmao.
Why not remote functions or something like that.
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.
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
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
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"?
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.
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.
Except it's not quite shared but "containerized"
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.