Project is a React client and express backend. It's built and tested dockerized. We use testcafe and Chrome headless, so more memory is always useful for parallel builds.

Now if we started talking about "computeless" architecture I'll be confused. (Though maybe that'll be the trendy name for serverless data sources/sinks in a few years...)

I am pretty sure in English serverless means no server and "unprovisioned/unconfigurable" machines means you didn't provision them and you cannot configure them. Even in analogical sense this makes no sense. Something i could relate to is something like "Pay as you use" or "configurationless servers".

But that is just me, and if you think it is ok to randomly change the meaning of words that means me personally and randomly don't need to accept your new meaning (not giving out, just trying to explain my rationale)

Downvote all you want, but please do point out where i am wrong.

Because speech (and writing) can be figurative, not just literal. And because the term has reached wide adoption (at least, in the subset interested in discussing such things) and so not using the term makes conversation difficult and litigating the issue every time it's discussed adds no value to the discussion whatsoever.

So eventually people picked one. Today, the most common are "serverless architecture", "FaaS", or simply "Lambda" (borrowing from AWS).

You don't have to do anything. But it's simply a fact that many people know what you're talking about if you say the word "serverless". And that's what language is, a (kinda) agreed upon set of words which let you communicate with other people. If everyone but you understands a word, and you are crusading that they change it to something else, what is the point?

If you're interested, the concept of "prescriptivism" may be enlightening.

Lots of discussions have been had on how many people think "the cloud" is a sorta-magical thing, which "is just there". Just more recently some interesting aspects of "using the cloud" have been more thoroughly discussed (e.g. the jurisdiction it's hosted in, data breaches, etc). If the concept was described in a less abstract way, would these discussions have happened sooner? Later? Would it have become less of a "buzzword" amongst executives?

So, is "cloud" really a better term than "serverless"?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think calling them “configuration-less” or “pay as you go” servers is any more accurate. You’re really just buying processing time.

Could there have been a better word than serverless? Probably, but that is the one that is currently used for that general kind of architecture. I would have called that PaaS before, and sometimes still do.

Language is all about context. The meaning of words changes depending on it, even in plain English settings.

Wide spread terminology suffers from the evolutionary pressures of marketing. Only the catchiest, most marketable terms propagate.

In reality, words are often used in ways that don't necessarily meet the dictionary definition in the strictest sense.

For example, I complained to my local advertising authority that mobile providers are using the word "unlimited" to mean "limited by our fair usage policy" and I was told that this is fine as long as 95% (I don't remember the exact percentage, maybe it was 99) of customers will never reach the limit so its effectively unlimited. That's not really what the english language word means, but hey... that's life. Same thing applies here: words are recycled to have different meanings.

There are situations when I think its best to just go with the flow of how people are commonly using words but simply accepting what others say in a blanket sense is not right either. In the case of "serverless" it doesnt really matter much to me, but if you think of the word "gyp" for example thats something many people have had to make a conceited effort to stop using. So in some cases, with effort we can improve the language we use and not always be swimming against the tide.

So it does allocate virtual infrastructure?

If you were to go down deeper, a server is just an electrical machine which shuffles eletrons around. So, you could say "there's no point in talking about 'servers', if we're just using transistors when you really think about it".

But it would convey no useful information if someone asked you "what are you using to run your service?" and you replied "well, I just move electrons around", would it?

As far as managing goes, most of the server are not managed by you anyway. But yeah i get it, everyone likes it so...

In that scenario, not having to even consider if the error you're getting is because your server is restarting/out-of-memory/needing-update/broken-by-a-coworker like 99% of the time is as close to "serverless" as it gets, in terms of day-to-day work activities and worries.