Lamdas aren't stateless or ephemeral either. Anything that occurs on code load will persist on that container (i.e., if you initialize something at the module level in Node, it will persist between calls to the same container; this can cause all kinds of weirdness if you aren't aware of it. For instance, I have seen where a dev read some data at load time, and then performing destructive operations on it as part of data transformations in the code, and then wondered why he was getting non-deterministic results back). And there's a half gig of temp space on each container you can write to as well.

While the definition of what constitutes 'serverless' is pretty ambiguous, no one includes ephemeral state as a systems requirement, else you have something useless.

DynamoDB is generally viewed as serverless because there's no management of an underlying VM, and for some definitions because it can scale out horizontally automatically, without downtime, to meet demand (as compared with RDS, or another managed database solution that can only scale vertically).

We actually rely heavily on Lambda statefulness to reduce latency - many objects/data are constructed/fetched on cold start and cached for subsequent invocations.

Having no hosts to manage is the defining feature of serverless.

When you create a DB with DynamoDB, you're just telling AWS "I need a database" and it gives you one. No need to worry about deciding how much CPU power, RAM, or storage you'll need for it.

> It seems that every every "hosted" solution is now being dubbed "serverless". :\

Got a good example of something being called "serverless" that you don't think should be? I mean, yes, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc. are all running on servers. But the idea is that you don't manage them. No packages to keep up to date. No worrying about whether or not the instance size you chose is big enough. No dealing with autoscaling to meet demand when a million reddit users hit your app.

DynamoDB, Aurora, Kinesis, etc all existed BEFORE Lambda, and noone called them "serverless" until Lambda and now everything is called that.

Meanwhile Kinesis requires you to specify the number of shards you have to use, so there is management even if they're not called "servers".

> No need to worry about deciding how much CPU power, RAM, or storage you'll need for it.

You realize you specify the RAM for lambda functions, which correlates to CPU.

And with Dynamo you specify RCUs and WCUs and you enable autoscaling which adds more...

I'm not trying to be pedantic about "The cloud being just someone else's servers". I mean that "serverless" to mean is a very explicit thing about Lambda and writing stateless code. And every existing hosted multi-tenant service shouldn't just be dubbed that.