> please do point out where i am wrong

Because speech (and writing) can be figurative, not just literal. And because the term has reached wide adoption (at least, in the subset interested in discussing such things) and so not using the term makes conversation difficult and litigating the issue every time it's discussed adds no value to the discussion whatsoever.

In a very literal sense, you're not wrong. But the concept of a serverless architecture (as of common parlance today in 2017) has a lot of nuances which are hard to convey in any single word.

So eventually people picked one. Today, the most common are "serverless architecture", "FaaS", or simply "Lambda" (borrowing from AWS).

You don't have to do anything. But it's simply a fact that many people know what you're talking about if you say the word "serverless". And that's what language is, a (kinda) agreed upon set of words which let you communicate with other people. If everyone but you understands a word, and you are crusading that they change it to something else, what is the point?

If you're interested, the concept of "prescriptivism" may be enlightening.

The ship sailed a while ago for common nomenclature for “function in the cloud” services. You can’t really fault someone for using the term the way the entire industry uses it.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think calling them “configuration-less” or “pay as you go” servers is any more accurate. You’re really just buying processing time.

I'm also pretty sure most cloud systems contain very few condensed water droplets. The containers I work with are not 20 or 40 foot long, and while I ship stuff with their help, no actual ships are involved.

Could there have been a better word than serverless? Probably, but that is the one that is currently used for that general kind of architecture. I would have called that PaaS before, and sometimes still do.

The "serverless" in this context means that they may as well be invisible to you, since you don't need to care about them. In the case of Lambda, you upload your code somehow Amazon runs it on a spare server somewhere.

Language is all about context. The meaning of words changes depending on it, even in plain English settings.

You're not wrong. "Pay as you use" doesn't quite capture it, and "configurationless servers" isn't quite buzz-wordy (eg. short and memorable) to make marketable.

Wide spread terminology suffers from the evolutionary pressures of marketing. Only the catchiest, most marketable terms propagate.

> please do point out where i am wrong.

In reality, words are often used in ways that don't necessarily meet the dictionary definition in the strictest sense.

For example, I complained to my local advertising authority that mobile providers are using the word "unlimited" to mean "limited by our fair usage policy" and I was told that this is fine as long as 95% (I don't remember the exact percentage, maybe it was 99) of customers will never reach the limit so its effectively unlimited. That's not really what the english language word means, but hey... that's life. Same thing applies here: words are recycled to have different meanings.

"Serverless" means "I can run code without having to maintain my own server or execution environment". Using the term "serverless" for that might be confusing and non-literal, but that's how we use it, and the term has stuck. Arguing about that several years ago may have made sense, but that ship sailed long ago.

You're not wrong. I usually call them "application-less" architectures. That's really what's going on here.

I get it, I do. But that ship sailed loooong ago

While you're at it, Don Quixote, please convince X-Windows to stop abusing the words client and server, too.

Someone does, but not you. Obviously, there's a server somewhere which runs your code. But since you don't deal with it directly, it's mostly as if there was no server - since it was abstracted away form you so you could focus on what you really want to do.

If you were to go down deeper, a server is just an electrical machine which shuffles eletrons around. So, you could say "there's no point in talking about 'servers', if we're just using transistors when you really think about it".

But it would convey no useful information if someone asked you "what are you using to run your service?" and you replied "well, I just move electrons around", would it?