i’d guess that JS’s success in serverless is due more to the ability to embed and sandbox it, which makes life easier for hosting providers
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That is a very insightful observation.
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Aw shucks.
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This is related to
@mikeal's post from today: to understand a popularity explosion, look to effects on amateurs not pros. -
"it makes it easier for just about anyone to build backend logic" >>> "it helps a handful of Serious Apps scale to a billion RPS"
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Make Web Development Easy Again™
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To the original point of my thread though, I don't think serverless will take over because it is not a universally applicable pattern.
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It makes some things easier and some things harder. It's a good pattern to apply sometimes, but not always.
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I love the idea of people embracing shared nothing more though! Curious what the serverless community thinks about data storage in general.
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So far impression that they try very hard not to think about it, but I'm cynical :-)
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I think ease of ops is key. To me, serverless means “managed, auto-scaling PaaS”. App Engine counts I think. Not about JS.
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But app engine never called itself serverless and is oooold. Suddenly a "serverless" movement popped up and ppl are convinced JS pioneered

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To me this means serverless is just, for most people, a JS flavor of a particular kind of PaaS. Your definition fits Heroku+Rails.
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Intentionally so (if you autoscale) Why shouldn’t it? You could also add “no RAM shared by requests” but that seems very slippery+unhelpful.
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Right, so I agree with this, but the thread yesterday had people contorting themselves to explain why its *new*.
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I agree that by any reasonable defn it's not, but the fact that people so badly want it to be can't be ignored.
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I would like to make clear that at no point did I argue it was anything new:-)
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Yeah it mostly wasn't you :) I think it's useful to see "serverless" as a continuation of Heroku + shared-nothing. Name sucks as a result.
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