Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
by MaxBarraclough on Saturday January 04, 2020 @09:05AM
(#21954934)
It's an annoying marketing term, sure enough, but the ideas it names aren't terrible. It's not always a mistake to pay someone else to take care of maintenance, scaling and security.
Perhaps managed service would be better?
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
by baddox on Saturday January 04, 2020 @12:24PM
(#21956072)
It’s more than just a managed service. RDS is Amazon’s managed database cloud service, but you still provision and pay for a specific virtual server with a certain number of CPUs and amount of RAM. “Serverless” generally implies that you do not provision any server hardware (even virtual) and instead only provide application code.
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
by MaxBarraclough on Saturday January 04, 2020 @01:54PM
(#21956618)
I see your point, but we could view that as a quirk of the way they handle billing.
If the instance fails, you're insulated from that, right?
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
by baddox on Saturday January 04, 2020 @04:18PM
(#21957644)
I’m no expert, but I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS. I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it.
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
by MaxBarraclough on Saturday January 04, 2020 @04:36PM
(#21957760)
> I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS
Yes I think that's right. That is to say, it doesn't give you replication.
> I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it.
No need for the quotation marks, that's the correct terminology. Your suspicions seem to be right on - it looks like RDS handles instance-failure for you, with non-trivial downtime, but no data-loss. [0]
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-under-the-h...
The name is just a marketing gimmick. Absent any other context, "serverless" seems like it must be a paradigm shifting technology so sufficiently advanced that it renders servers obsolete, as if by magic.
It's the same sort of trick that people sometimes pull when they show off an application to "do x in 10 lines" (or some absurd low number), when the app is just making API calls to a remote server running several million LOC.