Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine.
Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite.
There's definitely criticisms to be made of the term serverless and how it obscures the role of servers, but Orwellian is not the correct category. Maybe we could say such services run on servelets to describe how they're "lighter" in some sense but still servers.
Yea, I agree after more thought. I think the key is what you said; the term is useful for dividing within a specific domain. People outside that domain see the word and think "those guys are calling this Category-A thing "not-category-A", that makes no sense! Inside the Category A world, there is much more nuance.
In the "code" system the end user does not write code either - that's the developer's job. In the "no code" system it's the developer who doesn't write code, and in the "serverless" system it's the developer who doesn't set up servers.
"Serverless" refers to the demarcation point in the shared responsibility model. It means there aren't any servers about as much as "cloud hosting" means the data centers are flying.
This is where is becomes confusing to me: Here are a few types of software/infrastructure. Embedded devices. Operating systems. PC software. Mobile device software. Web frontends. GPU kernels. These all truly don't use servers. When I hear "serverless", I would think it is something like that. Yet, they're talking about web servers. So it feels like a deception, or something poorly named.
If you are in the niche of IT, servers, HTTP operations etc, I can see why the name would make sense, because in that domain, you are always working with servers, so the name describes an abstraction where their technical details are hidden.
Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine.
Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite.
There's definitely criticisms to be made of the term serverless and how it obscures the role of servers, but Orwellian is not the correct category. Maybe we could say such services run on servelets to describe how they're "lighter" in some sense but still servers.
Yea, I agree after more thought. I think the key is what you said; the term is useful for dividing within a specific domain. People outside that domain see the word and think "those guys are calling this Category-A thing "not-category-A", that makes no sense! Inside the Category A world, there is much more nuance.
I doubleplus appreciate the thought.
"Serverless" means you don't have to configure the servers, or know what servers, where, are running your code.
"Here's some code, make sure it runs once an hour, I don't care where."
"There's no cloud; it's just someone else's computer"
But your so called "no-code" system runs on code. Checkmate atheists.
There becomes a point where being mad that the specific flavor of PaaS termed serverless achtually has severs is just finding a thing to be mad at.
In the "no-code" system, the end user does not write code. In the "serverless" system, the end user does connect to a server.
It doesn't just "have" servers; they aren't a hidden implementation detail. Connecting to a website is an instrumental part of using the software.
In the "code" system the end user does not write code either - that's the developer's job. In the "no code" system it's the developer who doesn't write code, and in the "serverless" system it's the developer who doesn't set up servers.
"Serverless" refers to the demarcation point in the shared responsibility model. It means there aren't any servers about as much as "cloud hosting" means the data centers are flying.
This is where is becomes confusing to me: Here are a few types of software/infrastructure. Embedded devices. Operating systems. PC software. Mobile device software. Web frontends. GPU kernels. These all truly don't use servers. When I hear "serverless", I would think it is something like that. Yet, they're talking about web servers. So it feels like a deception, or something poorly named.
If you are in the niche of IT, servers, HTTP operations etc, I can see why the name would make sense, because in that domain, you are always working with servers, so the name describes an abstraction where their technical details are hidden.
and your wireless modem has wires
It's just the tech-bro version of "shared hosting", now with a 10000% markup and per-request billing.
Thats true!