The "as-a-service" part already means 3rd-party management. Billing is completely orthogonal and as varied as the runtimes.

> Serverless also implies 3rd party management and pay-per-use.

How does it do that? "Serverless" as a word implies no servers, and therefore no 3rd-party management, and no pay-per-use.

Which is why the name sucks.

It implies those things because that's what it means?

Nah, that's a redefinition attempt that got out of hand.

No it’s no more out of hand than any other term that has been co opted in computer science and that most people in the industry have sccepted like bugs, viruses, bits, etc.

Uh, what was the previous 'computer science' definition of 'serverless' ?

What was the previous "computer science" definition of "debug", "virus", "platform", etc. before someone coined it? But as time goes on, if you are part of the profession, when someone starts a conversation about the merits of "serverless", it's not helpful or insightful to keep with the tired response "the code is running on servers not via magic pixie dust".

That response is about as insightful in 2018 as saying "I don't know why they are calling it debugging. Don't they know there are no physical bugs in their code"?

The other terms you mention have some relation to the original meanings. A computer "virus" is named after the infectious, peer-to-peer spread of the real one. A "platform" is named after a supporting structure. "Debugging" has an engineering tradition that predates software[0].

"Serverless" is the exact opposite of that. It's taking a word that literally means "without servers" and making it mean "with servers, possibly a lot of them".

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#Etymology

The "aaS" suffix in "FaaS" also clearly implies those things.