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Discussion on: Explain Serverless Like I'm Five

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Serverless sometimes refers to something specific and sometimes it's more of an idea or ideology. And that idea is that the server can be completely abstracted away. You don't have to worry about compute capacity, memory management, uptime, cost to some extent.

Calling it serverless would be like calling a higher level programming language like JavaScript or Python "memoryless". Yes, you don't manually manage pointers and memory in some of these programming languages, but it's there.

Serverless sometimes refers to the concept of "functions as a service", basically taking the microservices pattern and realizing "hey, because we're doing things this way, we basically can forget about the server". Somebody is still doing the heavy lifting (AWS, Google Cloud, etc.) but it's now an abstraction and you have limited ability to configure it, and this is fine if you're using it for the right use cases.

It's good to know that folks are starting to solve problems in this way so you can stay in the loop, but avoid going this route to solve problems you don't have.

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lauragift21 profile image
Gift Egwuenu

Thanks, Ben :).Your explanation really came in handy. Serverless is more like No servers but meanwhile, there are actual servers but I'm not dealing with it.