> Why is it called "serverless" when it is not, in fact, serverless?
It is serverless from the perspective of an IT department that, by adopting it, no longer has to manage servers as a distinct resource.
It's like a product sold as having “worry-free interoperation”. There's still worry in the interoperation, you are just paying someone else to do the worrying.
Likewise, a serverless product still has servers underneath, you are just paying someone else to abstract them so that they aren't a concern for you.
but someone has to manage the things that manage the lambda right? you're just moving IT server operations to devops...my understanding of lambda is limited to "you write functions and you pay per function compute" so please correct me if i'm wrong
No, the cloud is a term for dynamically provisionable resources, some of which (IaaS, for instance) still require traditional server management.
It's true that the invention of the term, originally for Amazon's Functions-aaS, wasn't particularly distinguishing from lots of existing cloud SaaS categories (classical PaaS, DBaaS, etc.) which are equally free of server management to FaaS services, but the terms has subsequently been broadened in use (AFAICT, Google Cloud Platform was the main driver here) so that it makes more sense than Amazon's original use did.
Hmm. Your reply has left me even more confused about the nomenclature. Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter if I actually understand what these names mean or not.
It is serverless from the perspective of an IT department that, by adopting it, no longer has to manage servers as a distinct resource.
It's like a product sold as having “worry-free interoperation”. There's still worry in the interoperation, you are just paying someone else to do the worrying.
Likewise, a serverless product still has servers underneath, you are just paying someone else to abstract them so that they aren't a concern for you.