For me the BIGGEST gain of using serverless architecture is security. For example, this year I started two ecommerce platforms. One's a digital delivery e-shop - selling ebooks, training and stuff and the other is a physical delivery e-shop. Normally, I'd write my own Phoenix/Rails app, but this time, I decided to go serverless for my furniture shop and wrote it all in Jekyll. Yes, the static site builder. I use netlify to manage the production aspect of it (which IS pretty AWESOME) and simple excel sheets to track inventory (which is what my vendor provides me, anyway). For payment, I simply use the checkout/cart functionality provided by Paypal and all this just works! The site is designed in such a way that you can't even tell anyway what's being used for the backend. No one can tell it's just a bunch of static HTML pages on display.
Whereas, for my digital delivery store, I regularly need to check my logs to see if anyone's doing anything suspecious. For example, a lot of IPs randomly try to visit wp-login.php or /phpmyadmin. Maintaining a production web application is a full time job by itself, if you don't have a team.
Having said that, many people would immediately assume static page builders are generally dumb. That isn't exactly true - You can automate a lot of stuff. For example, my local machine has a custom Jekyll plugin for my store that resizes and optimizes product images before pushing to prod to keep the page load time small. IF I had chosen the Rails/Phoneix route, I'd need to worry about hosting imagemagick or the like somewhere. Or maybe write some code to communicate with an third party API and usually, it's not free.
End of the day, I make sales and that's all that matters. That's when it hit me hard that my customers needn't care nor know what's behind their favorite site.
If static sites are now also Serverless, the word has lost all meaning.
IF I had chosen the Rails/Phoneix route, I'd need to worry about hosting imagemagick or the like somewhere.
Static sites have no option but to run that stuff ahead of time, but that doesn't mean that dynamic sites can't do the same. Asset Pipelines with precompilation are pretty common - both Rails and Phoenix have one.
"Serverless" is itself a bit of a misnomer. The point seems to be to distribute stateless sub-computations. Whoop dee doo. At some point you need a "server" to modify application state. A static site has no state modifications, so it actually is serverless in this sense of having stateless computation.
I get it, but while the name is not very good, there's a reason why it came about now, despite the fact that we've had static website hosting for decades. It was coined to describe a particular kind of service, and retrofitting it makes it less useful and more prone to confusion.
Right, but we've had that since the start of the web. I get that Serverless is not a very good name, but there's a reason why it was coined now - it was meant to describe a particular kind of service that appeared recently. If we're going to apply it backwards to any web hosting service where the host was not explicitly managed, the term becomes much less useful.
> If we're going to apply it backwards to any web hosting service where the host was not explicitly managed
But that's the thing - there is no "the host" any more. In the days of yore, if the physical machine hosting your site failed, your site went down. Maybe some rare services had failover and redundancy to some degree, but they were primitive at best compared to AWS (and the other serverless providers, for that matter) today. There was simply no comparison to the ecosystem that exists today. Have you ever had to manage production hosts before? It simply boggles my mind how many people throw out these "the cloud is just somebody else's computer" comparisons - like they've never had to diagnose JVM garbage collection thrashing at 3 in the morning before, or dealt with a server that goes down due to 100% of disk space being consumed by logs, or patch a massive fleet in a matter of hours in response to a CVE, or a power outage, or a hyper-localized network event in a data center, or any of the other million+ super annoying problems that come with managing physical hosts, and to a large degree, VMs/VPSes.
I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me :) my point is exactly that: what AWS et all are offering now is not like what we used to have, so we should use the term "serverless" for stuff we already had, like fully-managed static sites.
Ha, I thought I was disagreeing, but having gone back and re-read just now, I realize I must have misread because, yes, I agree with you 100%. I was also partially expressing general grist at the naivetë of some of the other commenters.
Whereas, for my digital delivery store, I regularly need to check my logs to see if anyone's doing anything suspecious. For example, a lot of IPs randomly try to visit wp-login.php or /phpmyadmin. Maintaining a production web application is a full time job by itself, if you don't have a team.
Having said that, many people would immediately assume static page builders are generally dumb. That isn't exactly true - You can automate a lot of stuff. For example, my local machine has a custom Jekyll plugin for my store that resizes and optimizes product images before pushing to prod to keep the page load time small. IF I had chosen the Rails/Phoneix route, I'd need to worry about hosting imagemagick or the like somewhere. Or maybe write some code to communicate with an third party API and usually, it's not free.
End of the day, I make sales and that's all that matters. That's when it hit me hard that my customers needn't care nor know what's behind their favorite site.