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0 pointsralmeida8y ago0 comments

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.

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mirko228y ago· 2 in thread

My point is that i was not aware what "serverless" meant when i first came upon it and the word itself did not convey any meaning without a lot of context as it does not lend it self to analogies such as "server", "container" or even "cloud" for that matter.

dkersten8y ago

True. I regularly encounter words whose meanings in whatever context I don't understand. Usually, if a word sounds confusing or used in the wrong context, a quick Google search will clarify what I was missing. Sure its a bit irritating when words are recycled to have a different meaning, but its rarely an issue in practice, in my experience and opinion.

ralmeidaOP8y ago

I get you. Neither was I. But at a certain level, words are arbitrary and imperfect anyway. In your own example, "cloud" is often regarded as a bad term, because it tends to abstract away too much that it's just "somebody else's computer", as it's often defined.

Lots of discussions have been had on how many people think "the cloud" is a sorta-magical thing, which "is just there". Just more recently some interesting aspects of "using the cloud" have been more thoroughly discussed (e.g. the jurisdiction it's hosted in, data breaches, etc). If the concept was described in a less abstract way, would these discussions have happened sooner? Later? Would it have become less of a "buzzword" amongst executives?

So, is "cloud" really a better term than "serverless"?

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