Ultimately "serverless" is always going to involve a computer of some sort somewhere, most likely a server ...

Functions as a Service is a much better description of the pattern... As an Ops person we often get a lot of requests for I need this (small) thing to happen when x... in the past we might have managed this with severs (probably called misc-{1..n}) running simple scripts as cron jobs...

I see "serverless" as a much better way to manage this sort of stuff ... and FaaS is especially good for this since anything that can go inside a container can be a function, so all the little bits of bash and perl and ruby and whatever script stuff just get chucked at this thing and just work...

Do you also rail against "wireless" phones as there's wires involved somewhere?

It is called serverless as in the ideal state you let the scaling of the server be handled by someone else. Just like with cell phones you only care about the last bit before it gets to you.

No, he calls his phone "towerless", "networkless", and "carrierless" because he doesn't personally own or manage his own towers, networks, or carriers.

We spoke about this at the CNCF serverless WG session a couple of days ago. I think there was consensus that the term Serverless applies to an architectural pattern and is not meant to be taken literally (as with so many other design patterns - bridge, factory, facade etc). Serverless also refers to the experience the developer gets of "packaging and deploying" the application without worrying about scale.

"Just-in-time server" would have been a much better name

Why doesn't not caring what server a function is running on and allowing a piece of code to jump from one host to another not constitute serverless, a term that has come to mean exactly that?

Because it's still using a server. large scale distributed resource abstracting server network (short lsd-rasn) or something along these lines would be more accurate.

Also, cloud computing does not actually run inside clouds.

Wow. You do not work in marketing!

"correct" is never what wins. cloud computing?