Recently I have been engaging more with people on Social Media and I have been getting some interesting questions. Perhaps not the most grammatically correct questions but good questions nonetheless. I figured their questions any my answers might make for good posts so here goes:

why is it called #serverless but you create it using services like #aws for instance? I mean aws creates a server, ubuntu, debian, redhat centos whatever on witch you put nginx or apache or whatever to run your code. Am i missing the point?

My response:

#AWS EC2 creates virtual servers that you can run Ubuntu on and what not. That is not considered #serverless, just virtual servers. My understanding is that serverless is more like a Lambda where when needed it boots up, you have little control over where or what hardware it is run on and then spins back down. No persistent state, meaning that the next lambda doesn't have any memory of what the last lambda did unless you saved it to a persistent state data source outside of the lambda. Now to confuse you more they do have Serverless DBs that do have persistent state but just like the lambda the CPUs processing the query spin up and spin down just when needed. A little slower than an "Always on" solution but often much cheaper and easier to maintain.

Let me know if you enjoy posts like this.