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I've seen distaste for the word "serverless" emerge a few times on HN and I really don't get it. Is it just excessive literalism? Of course I know that there are servers somewhere, the selling point of serverless is that as the user I generally don't have to think about them. My wireless vacuum presumably has wires in it, but I don't find that to be false advertising. The point is that the wires (and servers) don't get in my way :)


I do appreciate the "wireless" analogy, however even if you did have a vacuum cleaner without any internal wires at all, it wouldn't really make any difference for you as a user.

Whereas there is such a thing as fully peer-to-peer systems without actual servers. It's almost as if the people who coined and marketed the term want to consolidate the idea that servers/backends are an inherent property of information systems.

It should be said that I am a both a believer in that the words we use shape they way we conceptualize and reason about things, and also a proponent for less infrastructure centralization.

Now you might say, "we already have the word peer-to-peer with that meaning". IMO peer-to-peer has been diluted to the point of being practically meaningless, commonly used to describe systems such as Google Hangouts.

I don't believe there is any kind of conspiracy or conscious effort on the side of vendors or providers to do this, but effectively we don't have a word to describe fully decentralized/distributed/peer-to-peer/serverless software today because all those words have either been diluted or have a different meaning. It gives me some 1984 doublespeak vibes.

Besides all the above: My original comment was meant as honest advice that they should reconsider using the term this way, given both that:

* I'm not the only one who feel this way, so it will likely put off other potential customers as well * There is disagreement on what the term should mean even as commonly used (just look at other comments here arguing that nothing with state between invocations can be considered "serverless")

I think the intended meaning will come across much clearer by instead calling it "Fully managed Redis" or, if it's crucial to get across the billing model, "Fully managed, pay-as-you go Redis".




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