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Ask HN: What Is Serverless

2 points by shreythecray ↗ HN
If you had to breakdown serverless and explain it to someone in middle school, how would you describe it?

Would you use an analogy to make it more relatable? Would you try to explain it on a surface level or go into the depths of serverless? What concepts would you focus on?

9 comments

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TotoHorner
A web server will take requests and serve them.

The web server does this by looking at the request and then running a certain set of instructions on how to serve the request.

Rather than having to build the web server, serverless is a service where you can just give the serverless provider the instructions and they will run them for you.

shreythecray
How would you explain to them what a web server is? Same for request or server. What type of instructions are you referring to?
TotoHorner
Not sure how many middle schoolers you've talked to recently, but they're quite tech savvy. They're all used to google docs, tik tok, bereal, and whatever else they're using.

I'd be surprised if they didn't know what a server is. It's become common lexicon to say "Oh that website's servers are down".

Maybe bring up that time Roblox's servers were down for 72 hours or whatever.

But yeah so, your browser sends a request to the website's servers.

The servers run code (just instructions written so that a computer can understand) to complete that request.

zenosmosis
True, and if they play online video games, they probably know as well.
gvb
Its a programmable calculator on steroids.

You create "one liner" programs (lambdas) that do mathematical operations like you would with a programmable calculator, including saving to memory and recalling from memory. You can then chain together the various "one liner" programs (composability) to make a complex program that performs the calculation that you need.

scombridae
Instead of keeping it under your mattress, you can give your cash to a bank with the guarantee of making withdrawals anytime, anywhere. Serverless is like a bank for information, not money.
hitpointdrew
To middle school student, I think I would say something like "It's an abstraction layer that Cloud Providers offer so that you can hand them your code, this abstraction layer will spin up/down infrastructure on demand whenever your code is requested/called. Underneath it all there are still servers and infrastructure, it's called serverless because you (the developer) do not have to think about or manage those servers, you just worry about your code."
nathants
serverless: it’s a thing that runs your code.

server: it’s a thing that runs your code. you also have to take care of it.

nikau
stuff that runs on a server.