Why is using the Cloud referred to as going ‘serverless’ when the companies offering Cloud services are STILL using servers?
In: Technology
I think there is a fundamental misconception underlying this question, maybe because of terrible messaging by hype companies misusing a buzzword. Not all cloud computing is “serverless”. In fact, only a tiny portion of cloud computing is “serverless”.
Most cloud computing involves customers being aware of the nodes (e.g. AWS EC2 instances) and storage that they are renting, and paying for by the hour. Customers don’t manage the server hardware, but their VMs are “servers” that they still provision and manage.
“Serverless” is a small niche, provided by products like AWS Lambda. You don’t provision a server or RAM or anything from their cloud. You provide a “function”, some bit of code, and you tell AWS Lambda: “Every time someone hits this URL, run my function/code, giving my code the URL parameters”. So you don’t have any of your code, or any VM, running in their cloud minute-by-minute. You only have code running in their cloud if-and-when someone hits your URL.
You pay per function invocation, based on how much CPU and RAM each function invocation takes.
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