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Poll: What Does "Serverless" Mean?

Jeremy Likness ⚡️ on June 12, 2019

I posted this to Twitter: Jeremy Likness ⚡️ @jeremylikness ...
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Tom Wright •

For me, it's mostly about having to think (less) about servers. As in, I'm managing the mental overhead of one less layer. The four bullet points you list are techniques that vendors use in order to facilitate this:

  • Microbilling means we don't have to worry about being penalised for forgetting to tear down a server, or trying to justify the cost jump of bringing a new server online.
  • Event-driven operation means we can spend less time writing boilerplate, configuring cron, etc.
  • Auto scale means we can (somewhat) stop worrying about handling spikes in demand, or having provisioned hardware sitting idle
  • No config means, well, no config. It's one less thing to have to do.

The flip side, to me at least, we trade servers for services. By becoming serverless, we also tend to being servicefull. It's a good trade, in my opinion, because it shifts the focus away from managing infrastructure and onto tools that will help you achieve your objectives.

I suspect, however, that we (the community) will continue to have these discussions for a very long time!