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Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

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Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#4
post #2

> The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. So it's a meaningless buzzword. Got it.

It's abstracting above having to manage and think about servers. Just as most developers stopped having to think about registers or print drivers or low-level network protocols or memory pages. You still have all these but you gain big by having technologies that let you abstract away from these levels of detail. Buzzwordy, yeah sure. But the meaning and implications are pretty powerful.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#5
post #4
post #2

> The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. So it's a meaningless buzzword. Got it.

It's abstracting above having to manage and think about servers. Just as most developers stopped having to think about registers or print drivers or low-level network protocols or memory pages. You still have all these but you gain big by having technologies that let you abstract away from these levels of detail. Buzzwordy, yeah sure. But the meaning and implications are pretty powerful.

But we already have a name for that: PaaS.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#6
post #2

> The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. So it's a meaningless buzzword. Got it.

Recently I've been fascinated with software architectures that shift the locus of control back to the client, instead of the server/cloud.

So seeing "serverless" in the title caught my attention, only to find that it too looked like just another buzzword..

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#7
post #6
post #2

> The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. So it's a meaningless buzzword. Got it.

Recently I've been fascinated with software architectures that shift the locus of control back to the client, instead of the server/cloud. So seeing "serverless" in the title caught my attention, only to find that it too looked like just another buzzword..

Yep. This really is a wasted occasion, I'd have been really interested in how to build application-specific or generic P2P networks to do that kind of stuff, at the smaller or the wider scale.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#9
post #8

I didn't go it. After all I've been coding distributed applications since early 90's. So what changed in network topologies?

Nothing. Similar to yourself my world hasn't changed in that time, and cloud hasn't affected me either.

Cloud is a great idea, assuming you're scratch-building for a particular environment (AWS, Azure, etc). Targeting one of those environments constrains my choice of technologies and tools, unless I have the cash for my own private cloud. I don't.

So the only real change for me in the last 20 years has been the switch to IP, and on top of that HTTP instead of TCP. My remote procedure calls still contain byte arrays, and I build all servers and their components myself.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#10
post #4
post #2

> The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. So it's a meaningless buzzword. Got it.

It's abstracting above having to manage and think about servers. Just as most developers stopped having to think about registers or print drivers or low-level network protocols or memory pages. You still have all these but you gain big by having technologies that let you abstract away from these levels of detail. Buzzwordy, yeah sure. But the meaning and implications are pretty powerful.

Except it doesn't really. You still have to deal with the important things. All that's removed is the tediousness of the physical server maintenance. You still need to architect for redundancy, deal with latency, client/server caching, etc. Your app cares just as much about the server as it always did and your server-side code needs to be as robust as if it were running on dedicated hardware (perhaps more robust).

And as wmf pointed out, we already have plenty of buzzwords for this. PaaS, IaaS, "Cloud computing", etc.

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