> Having a guy named Steve manage your servers is not "serverless" by my definition, because it's not about you personally having to manage the server, it's about anyone personally having to manage it. AWS Lambda is managed by Amazon as a singular giant computer
Well, that's sort of true of AWS Lambda, but it's just as true of EC2 and EBS, which aren't called "serverless". Moreover, "serverless" is a marketing term used to sell the service to Amazon customers, who can't tell whether or not there's a guy named Steve working at Amazon who lovingly nurtures each server†, or whether Amazon manages their whole Lambda farm as a giant herd of anonymous nodes, so I don't think it makes sense to argue that this is what it's intended to mean. As you point out, it's kind of a nonsense term since the code does in fact run on servers. I believe you were correct the first time in your earlier comments that you are now contradicting: they call it "serverless" because the customer doesn't have to manage servers, not because their own employees don't have to manage servers (except collectively).
> enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. (...) abstracts away all infrastructure management
This is a precise description of the value proposition that old-fashioned CGI hosting offers to hosting customers. (The containers are processes instead of KVM machines like Firecracker or cgroups like Docker, but "container" is a pretty generic term.)
So I think you've very clearly established that CGI scripts are "serverless" in the sense that Google's marketing uses, and, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44512427, the sense that Amazon's marketing uses.
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†Well, Steve would probably cost more than what Amazon charges, so customers may have a pretty good guess, but it could be a loss leader or something.
Well, that's sort of true of AWS Lambda, but it's just as true of EC2 and EBS, which aren't called "serverless". Moreover, "serverless" is a marketing term used to sell the service to Amazon customers, who can't tell whether or not there's a guy named Steve working at Amazon who lovingly nurtures each server†, or whether Amazon manages their whole Lambda farm as a giant herd of anonymous nodes, so I don't think it makes sense to argue that this is what it's intended to mean. As you point out, it's kind of a nonsense term since the code does in fact run on servers. I believe you were correct the first time in your earlier comments that you are now contradicting: they call it "serverless" because the customer doesn't have to manage servers, not because their own employees don't have to manage servers (except collectively).
> enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. (...) abstracts away all infrastructure management
This is a precise description of the value proposition that old-fashioned CGI hosting offers to hosting customers. (The containers are processes instead of KVM machines like Firecracker or cgroups like Docker, but "container" is a pretty generic term.)
So I think you've very clearly established that CGI scripts are "serverless" in the sense that Google's marketing uses, and, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44512427, the sense that Amazon's marketing uses.
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†Well, Steve would probably cost more than what Amazon charges, so customers may have a pretty good guess, but it could be a loss leader or something.