> Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest.
A whole bunch of folks have given up on shared operating systems at a security, access control, data governance, and maintainability (reproducibility) level. At least if your goal is to create software for some purpose other than building server infrastructure.
Some of them have decided that if you’re going to want things like database servers and ssh bastions and VPN servers and cache servers et c to live on dedicated machines or VMs for various good reasons anyway… and you let something else trigger your custom code as needed, as distinct processes with maybe a little hot caching, like in old school PHP or CGI or Inetd (remember that?!), why, now it’s looking an awful lot like you don’t really have a reason to manage a server for that at all, if someone else can provide some service to trigger your code under certain circumstances, if your code and your new unit of process isolation (a whole damn OS) can start up fast enough.
Now if you pay for managed versions of all those other 3rd party software packages you use, so you don’t need to hire a couple PostgreSQL experts to make upgrades anything but nail-biting, for example—congrats, you’ve fully reached “serverless” in the “cloud”.
Probably one or more people are working on that. But Linux and FreeBSD exist and have had a whole lot of testing hours put into them, both per se and to test various libraries and programs using them as their OS, so for now, that’s the safe option.
A whole bunch of folks have given up on shared operating systems at a security, access control, data governance, and maintainability (reproducibility) level. At least if your goal is to create software for some purpose other than building server infrastructure.
Some of them have decided that if you’re going to want things like database servers and ssh bastions and VPN servers and cache servers et c to live on dedicated machines or VMs for various good reasons anyway… and you let something else trigger your custom code as needed, as distinct processes with maybe a little hot caching, like in old school PHP or CGI or Inetd (remember that?!), why, now it’s looking an awful lot like you don’t really have a reason to manage a server for that at all, if someone else can provide some service to trigger your code under certain circumstances, if your code and your new unit of process isolation (a whole damn OS) can start up fast enough.
Now if you pay for managed versions of all those other 3rd party software packages you use, so you don’t need to hire a couple PostgreSQL experts to make upgrades anything but nail-biting, for example—congrats, you’ve fully reached “serverless” in the “cloud”.