Steve Chalmers
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Oops, I think we’re talking past each other. The discussion of “serverless” here is not about getting rid of servers, it’s about portions of server workloads not having servers permanently assigned, but rather being triggered to be put (briefly) on a server when it’s needed. So the AWS customer is paying essentially per invocation rather than renting a server.

  1. Concur with you that all cloud computing runs on servers, period.
  2. Concur that the shift from PC to smartphone essentially shifted a client’s storage from a local disk to the cloud. Yes, I know the smartphone has local storage, but anything big like a photo library has to be remote, and the last time my phone broke the new one simply downloaded its configuration and backup data.
  3. Smartphone apps are essentially all UIs for server based apps. Concur.
  4. JavaScript is just the client doing what it’s told by the server. Concur.
  5. Concur SaaS is server based.
  6. Concur smartphones and tablets shift more work to the (web) servers and do less locally.

I would point out that in the end, Linux did win the client war. Android is based on Linux. For Microsoft, a big “sic transit gloria”, but apparently that’s softened by a staggering amount of patent royalties.

We’ll have to see where Intel goes. I agree that Intel’s inward looking decision to be x86 everywhere, and the cancellation of every other processor family they had, a bit over a decade ago handed the smartphone processor market to ARM licensees. Sic transit gloria, again. But I spent my entire career on data center equipment R&D and strategy (server, storage, network) and assure you that the stickiness of what software runs where has to do with cost and complexity of porting, that has its roots in 40 or 50 years of spaghetti tendrils all over an infrastructure. There are things which will port easily to ARM, mostly where a single app is replicated to run 100,000 places so the cost of porting is miniscule relative to the cost of hardware. Likewise there are probably a million apps out there where the source code has been lost (or is duly archived on media which hasn’t been readable in decades).

That said, I have great respect for ARM (including several extremely capable former server colleagues who’ve joined the ARM team in the last year) and its licensees.

I don’t ever give out email addresses, but can be found on Twitter as @fstevenchalmers and on LinkedIn by that same name. I’ll follow to open DM’s for a brief conversation but typically unfollow after that, so as not to include people I really don’t know in my contacts.

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    Steve Chalmers

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    Student of complex systems; prematurely retired from a career in tech focused on the boundaries between server, storage, and network in the data center.

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