No. "Cloud" was the term invented for that, inherited from networking diagrams where it was common to represent the bits you don't manage as cloud figures. Usage of "Serverless" emerged from AWS Lamba, which was designed to have an execution model much like CGI. "Severless" refers to your application being less a server. Lamba may not use CGI specifically, but the general idea is very much the same.
> Serverless computing is an application development model where you can build and deploy applications on third-party managed server infrastructure. All applications require servers to run. But in the serverless model, a cloud provider manages the routine work; they provision, scale, and maintain the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider handles several tasks, such as operating system management, security patches, file system and capacity management, load balancing, monitoring, and logging. As a result, your developers can focus on application design and still receive the benefits of cost-effective, efficient, and massively scalable server infrastructure.
Right. And that makes sense. Because again, what we're talking about when we're talking about AWS Lambda is serverless functions. But AWS also uses the term for other things that are "serverless", again, like Aurora Serverless. Aurora Serverless is basically the same idea: the infrastructure is abstracted, except for a database. This effectively means the database can transparently scale from 0 to whatever the maximum instance sizes Amazon supports without a human managing database instances.
That's also the same idea for serverless functions. It's not about whether your application has a "server" in it.
The only word of this that is not is a description of old-fashioned shared CGI hosting is "massively scalable". (And maybe "efficient".)
Exactly. And how that development model differs from the traditional approach is that you don't have to implement a server. Deployment isn't a development model. The development is necessarily done by the time you get there.
> But AWS also uses the term for other things
The terms has expended to be used for all kinds of different things, sure. There is probably a toaster out there somewhere solid as being "Serverless" nowadays.
If we really want to get into the thick of it, "serverless" seems to go back much further, used to refer to certain P2P systems. But we know from context that isn't what we're talking about. Given the context, it is clear we are talking about "serverless" as it emerged out of Lamba, referring to systems that were CGI-esq in nature.
You're reading "application development model" and thinking "Exactly! It's all about the request handling model!" but that's not what Amazon said or meant. Consider the description of Amazon Fargate, a service that in fact can be used to run regular old web servers:
> AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers.
I guess the next argument is that Amazon is just diluting the term and originally it meant what you think it meant, and that is the terminal state of this debate since there is no more productive things to say.
Edit: you added more but it's just more attempting to justify away things that are plainly evident... But I can't help myself. This is just non-sense:
> Deployment isn't a development model,
Software development is not just writing code.
But it remains that deployment is normally considered to be independent of development. If you put your binaries on a CD instead of sending it to AWS, the application will still be considered developed by most people. Deployment is a post-development activity.
> I guess the next argument is that Amazon is just diluting the term
Could be. Would it matter? The specific definition you offer didn't even emerge until ~2023, nearly a decade after Lamba was introduced, so clearly they're not hung up on some kind of definitional purity. Services like Cloud Run figured out that you could keep the server in the application, while still exhibiting the spirit of CGI, so it is not like it is hard technical requirement, but it is the technical solution that originally emerged and was named as such.
If what you are trying to say, and not conveying it well, is that it has become a marketing term for all kinds of different things, you're not wrong. Like I suggested in another comment, there is probably a "Serverless" toaster for sale out there somewhere these days.
