*the image of cat and the green > symbols were there before I edited the image

I was feelin lazy, so here we go, have a post-

should probably post more, i feel good doin things.

anyway--- i hope u are doing well! <3

a cat looks intrigued but co fused at the camera.Text says "Serverless API? I look inside. What do I see? Servers". Small text all around the cat says "boneless chicken. never had any btw", "literally why is it called serverless if there are servers", "uf it wouldn't have servers, woukd it be local?", "can I run qwen 3.5 locally?", "just say that it has servers!", "this doesnt make any sense!". text in bottom right coner "edited by Maria on Lemmy"
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[–] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

The real meaning of 'serverless' isn't that there's no server, but that the server is outside the scope of what you have to think about.

The least abstracted level is bare metal. You provision the server, install an operating system, and manage system level dependencies and security updates and all of it yourself.

Then virtual machines, where you manage the VM but not the host it runs on.

Then containerisation where you manage the container and dependencies, but no longer have to think about the OS or the OS security updates.

Then finally serverless, where you as an engineer concern yourself primarily with only the code, and the platform takes care of the rest.

So it sounds kinda weird as a name, but the intent is right, because it's all about where the boundary of responsibility is drawn.

Someone always has to think about the server, but in serverless that someone isn't you.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Except that you do still have to think about them, because the fact that they're still just servers means that they can and will have outages. They also tend to be insanely expensive on relative compute cost compared to a server that you still call a server, which means a lot more thinking about your budget.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I'll have oversimplification for 10 dollars please.

    Virtual Machine: looks into, needs machines Cloud: looks into, is just renting Containers: looks into, we're now shipping the devs laptop Server less: looks into, has servers. Loft of them

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