Explain Serverless like I'm five

Theofanis Despoudis Oct 3 '17 ・1 min read

#explainlikeimfive #discuss #cloud

Ok, my 5-year-old kid has trouble understanding how you can have websites without a server. Plz explain.

DISCUSS (2)

Jochem Stoel

Oct 3 '17

Server-less websites as they call it is an hyped but meaningless and wrong term. A server-less website is simply a webpage or app that doesn't run on its own dedicated server/hosting but in stead uses cloud services to execute boxed functions.

You are still using servers, only not your own. The data-centers the cloud runs on are also servers. It just sounds way interesting to call them them server-less which is what I meant by hyped.

Server-less although misleading is not good or bad. The advantage is that you pay only for resource consumption. This means that you don't have to pay monthly or annually for a certain amount of hosting. You pay only when the resources are used. Think of this as paying $0.01 for every time you run some application logic and therefor use the cloud.

Wikipedia

"Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity."