Serverless runs on servers

I think the "Cat Looks Inside" meme would've been more appropriate, because the "Let's See Who This Really Is" (a.k.a. "Scooby Doo Reveal") meme is more about revealing something that is actually different, while CLI is sarcastic. Like "Wireless device. Look inside. Wires" isn't revealing anything serious but makes fun of the misleading nomenclature. A good SDR example would be pulling the mask off a KKK member to reveal a cop, while they are supposed to be on the opposite sides, they are one and the same.
On the meme spectrum, SDR sits somewhere between CLI and "They are the Same Picture".

Thank you for not coming to my MemTalk.

Wait, that's meant to be a joke?

MySQL: you set it up, if the server fails, you have to fix it. You set up replication, replication fails, you have to fix it. It's your alarms, you get up at 2:00 a.m., you set up backups. You deal with IP changes. You deal with your two+ boxes and their patches. Those servers are your responsibility. If their hypervisor needs an update you're stuck with the boxes going down.

Aurora serverless: you don't deal with any of that.

Saying they're the same as like saying that a self-driving taxi is the same as leasing your own car. In both cases there are servers involved, But in one of the two cases you don't have anything to do with the server.

As with everything marketing, words mean nothing they just sound cool.

From the point of view of the customer it is serverless. Maybe it's being done on a server, but maybe it's a magical genie in a bottle. You don't have to care because from your point of view you upload code and that code magically runs.

This fits perfectly in with other "-less" words. Like many "priceless" museum artifacts were bought and sold before they showed up in the museum. To the visitor and maybe to the museum they're priceless, but to the dealers who found it for the museum it had a price.

I don't think it is. it's what you use if you're serverless yourself.

"Function-based", "image-based" would have been slightly more accurate terms.

Wireless devices aren't actually "free of wires", it's that you don't have to deal with wires (or significantly less, since you still have to charge them etc., save for wireless charging). So that's not really new either.

Yeah, and the big selling point for serverless is that you only deal with the code you want to run, none of that "server management" stuff. It's a perfectly reasonable name based on what's appealing about it.

People used "function as a service", "managed *" or "compute as a service" for a bit, but serverless actually seemed to capture the gist of it for customers better. It may be marketing speak, but it does seem to be an effective shorthand for the value it provides.

Wouldn't it be server-opaque though, bc they don't see the server details?

As someone in the ISP/hosting business, i can tell you that there are plenty of companies incapable of sufficiently managing actual servers. For their own safety it's probably better to let someone else manage it for them (despite getting ripped off then)

Yes but the biggest benefit of serverless compute is not having to maintain a server and only maintaining your code.

Not really. Serverless is OpEx. VPS is OpEx, but you also need OpEx budget for a person who can manage servers, not just a programmer.

VPS isn't rocket science, so you can probably find someone who can both program things and do the basic VPS server management needed. But, it is work that needs to be done by someone. In some cases, like if you're hiring scientists from academia who have never done any of their own sysadmin type stuff, it might be easier to just go with serverless so all they need to do is write programs.

an oversimplification of a complex solution.

it's like eating at a restaurant and removed it's like eating at home.

while true, at home you didn't need to pay for the staff, stove, ingredients, pots, pans, water, flatware, plates, cups, etc... you also ignore the fact that your kitchen at home is comprised of a single 200w microwave, a minifridge, and a single plate.

We all are disagreeing on the naming not the functionality. It used to be the case that names in tech were descriptive, just by reading it out loud you can understand the tech (e,g. SQL, OOP etc.).

"Serverless" is a marketing term. A better name would be "server agnostic deployment" or many many other ways to describe it.

The fact is, this name was created by the people selling it not the people using it. And i am sure the idea is not new, but the serverless name tries to make it seem like a comparatively recent thing so people would buy it more.

It may also be cheaper because they only run (and acal) when needed, instead of having a few extra servers running "just in case".

Sure, you definitely don't need a devops to handle a serverless deployment.