just wondering how you define "serverless".
Is writing our app on PythonAnywhere "serverless"? Probably not since there is a server? How can you have an app served up without a server? Doesn't seem to make sense at first glance.
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what really is "serverless"?
In my view, "serverless" is one of those weird marketing terms that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. The Wikipedia page summarises its contradictory nature quite well:
Despite the name, it does not actually involve running code without servers. The name "serverless computing" is used because the business or person that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent or provision servers or virtual machines for the back-end code to run on.
On that basis, PythonAnywhere is probably a serverless system, despite the fact that we do have servers: you, as a customer, don't need to purchase, rent or provision servers -- we do that all for you. But being techies and preferring to only use words with real, logical meanings, we've chosen not to describe it that way ourselves :-)
giles
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PythonAnywhere staff
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Ah ok thanks, that makes sense. So from a marketing point of view, as users we use a serverless system since we don't need to manage any servers. From a technical point of view, we actually do use servers. Gotta love the industry buzzwords, haha.
Exactly :-)
So the term applies to most people's use of most web sites then? It doesn't add much value! ;----)
Well, I suppose some word is needed to differentiate Amazon Lambda, and us, and other things where your code runs on a server that you don't have to maintain from things like Amazon AWS where you do have to maintain the server. But it's a pretty silly choice of word :-)
@giles Thanks. I guess it's down to that phrase "owns the system" in your Wikipedia extract, which I didn't pay enough attention to.
So maybe it's about the population of website 'owners' only - some own and run the servers, while the others ('serverless') use Amazon, Google or Azure cloud, SaaS / PA / virtual servers etc.?
Jim
I think that's pretty much it -- as far as any marketingspeak can be defined properly, anyway!
