Alt text:
be me
serverless supervisor
in charge of making sure the serverless environment is in fact, serverless
occasionally have to check if it's really serverless
one day, find out there are actual servers being used
serverless environment is no longer serverless
distress.jpg
ask my boss what to do
he says "just make it serverless again"
I say "how"
he says "I don't know, you're the supervisor"
rage.jpg
quit my job
become a servers supervisor
first day on the job, go to the new server room
it's empty, serverless
Serverless means you don't have a server running 24/7 that's sitting idle waiting for requests. When a user makes a request on a webpage/app it'll run a short lived piece of code for a few dozen milliseconds then shuts off. No permanent "server" running. Of course there's servers running the code to start that function and usually a permanent database server but the main app/website code is running on demand only.
Sounds like the same result with extra steps?
There's a few advantages. No server maintenance is one, but the main benefits are scalability and cost. Renting a server is expensive and is billed regardless of usage per month. Serverless is billed in 10 millisecond blocks so you only pay for each request essentially. Since it creates one compute function per request, it will more easily scale up to meet a surge of users. Of course with any trendy technology it can be misused to situations where it's not a good fit and lose the cost and scalability benefits.
You forgot the part where the provider of your serverless charges you a multiple of what your idling server would cost you.
It’s basically slicing up a server and selling you some slices at an exaggerated premium.
You spend more on supervising the stuff running on the slices so they don’t bankrupt you when a peak happens than you would for maintaining a server.
But hey, it’s fashionable to be serverless so let’s all do it
so CGI
Yep. On someone else's big pool of servers.
It's practical, I swear!