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jchwHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

> Serverless is a marketing term for CGI, and you can observe that serverless is very popular

> Serverless is a marketing term for CGI, and you can observe that serverless is very popular. No, it's not. CGI is Common Gateway Interface, a specific technology and protocol implemented by web servers and applications/scripts. The fact that you do a fork+exec for each request is part of the implementation. "Serverless" is a marketing term for a fully managed offering where you give a PaaS some executable code and it executes it per-request for you in isolation. What it does per request is not defined since there is no standard and everything is fully managed. Usually, rather than processes, serverless platforms usually operate on the level of containers or micro VMs, and can "pre-warm" them to try to eliminate latency, but obviously in case of serverless the user gets a programming model and not a protocol. …

Original discussionServing a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI110 source comments · at import
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kragenHN

Serverless is a marketing term for CGI, and you can observe that serverless is very popular. A couple of years ago my (now) wife and I wrote a single-event Evite clone for our wedding invitations, using Django and SQLite. We used FastCGI to hook it up to the nginx on the server. When we pushed changes, we had to not just run the migrations (if any) but also remember to restart the FastCGI server, or we would waste time debugging why the problem we'd just fixed wasn't fixed. I forget what was supposed to start the FastCGI process, but it's not running now. I wish we'd used CGI, because it's not working right now, so I can't go back and check the wedding invitations until I can relogin to the server. I know that password is around here somewhere... A VPS would barely have simplified any of these problems, and would have added other things to worry about keeping patched. Our wedding invitat…

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kragenHN

CGI and other "serverless" technologies have essentially the same benefits and drawbacks. Sometimes an AWS Lambda function has longer startup time than if you had a running process already waiting to service a web request, because it's spinning up (AFAIK) an entire VPS. So all the arguments for "serverless" are also arguments for CGI, and all the arguments against CGI are arguments against "serverless". That's the sense in which I mean "Serverless is a marketing term for CGI." But you're right that it's not, strictly speaking, true, because (AFAIK, e.g.) AWS doesn't actually use the CGI protocol in between the parts of their setup, and I should have been clear about that. PHP is great as a runtime, but it sucks as a language, so I didn't want to use it. Django in regular CGI would have been fine; I just didn't realize that was an option.

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9rxHN

> No, it's not. It is not strictly limited to the CGI protocol, of course, but it is the marketing term for the concept of the application not acting as the server, of which CGI applications would be included. CGI, like all serverless applications, outsource the another process, such as Apache or nginx, to provide the server. Hence the literal name. > "Serverless" is a marketing term for a fully managed offering where you give a PaaS Fully managed offerings are most likely to be doing the marketing, so it is understandable how you might reach that conclusion, but the term is being used to sell to developers. It communicates to them, quite literally, that they don't have to make their application a server, which has been the style for networked applications for a long time now. But if you were writing a CGI application to run on your own systems, it would also be serverless.

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