Who the fuck decided that serverless computing is a good name for something that isn't serverless?

John.

It was John.

Wonder if theres any tl;dr somewhere about the serverless framework, I really don't get what its for.

@JoshBent there’s a channel on YouTube called “foobar” - the host does a good job of explaining serverless.

tldr; if you need to run a computation daily, rather than maintain a server to do this - turn the server into a docker image and connect to an API endpoint.

Now you just call the API every time you need to run the computation. You no longer need to keep the server running 24/7.

@kunashe thanks for explaining and recommending that channel! makes sense.

@kunashe but by definition it's still a server. the example reads like a microservice on a server :D

@koin yes - you're right.

I'd say serverless means dynamic micro service without the responsibility for scaling.

The cloud provider will automatically adjust CPU/memory depending on demand. In addition, the micro service lives only for the duration of the request & is destroyed after.

When another request is made the micro service is recreated. So you only ever pay for the time it takes to perform the request.

Serverless is essentially a kind of PaaS (platform as a service). You need to use the specific APIs and you get features like scaling, zero-config etc. It has limitations, too, tho. E.g. Running time limits, state management (you basically don't use file system)