we've got you surrounded! come deploy scalable cloud-native serverless applications using IaC!

(seriously i want to kill whoever came up with syntactic whitespace)

  • silent_water [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    it's a dumb name. it refers to services which don't have any running processes on any infrastructure by default. when a request to that service comes in, the runtime spins up a process to deal with that request and any others that might be pending + extra copies depending on how many requests are pending. when things quiet down, the process(es) is (are) terminated. they call it serverless because the service doesn't stay running permanently.

    ofc this means latency can wildly suck.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        it's a just-in-time cost saving measure. but you have to plan for it from the very start of a particular service cause it's basically impossible to retrofit. but yeah, my read is that it was the hot fad for a couple of years and faded away - AWS Lambda and the like still see use but it's on fewer buzzword checklists.

        the other advantage (the valuable one) is that it forces you to treat running processes as disposable. so rather than having a couple of bespoke applications that are very hard to upgrade, you have short-lived applications that get turned off all the time. you'd be surprised how often this is a problem in the large companies. makes actually releasing code for use by end-users unnecessarily hard. this approach is one way to solve that problem but imo there's better ways to achieve the same thing, without so much of a cost in terms of ux.