Aswath posted the question, Is “Serverless” a Virtue? He is talking about two recent announcements by Nimcat and Popular Telephony.
It looks like enterprise market is the primary focus. Absence of a centralized server is being advertised as a major benefit. These two companies efforts are getting press coverage as well. Since they are in the preliminary stages of their market activity, only sketchy technical details are available. It is suggested that enterprises using this system for voice communication do not have to buy expensive centralized servers like PBX or IP PBX. Granting this benefit, a quick analysis raises some questions that may not stand a careful analysis. … I am not sure the real advantage of the serverless architecture. The second point is whether an enterprise will accept the peer discovery procedure from a social and privacy point of view. Given these issues, it is useful to understand why a serverless architecture is preferable or in other words, whether centralized servers are inherently evil. [ Full post at Aswath's Weblog.]
2 comments so far
9:05 PM PT
Why is it that analysts believe that the world has to be just one way or another? In this case, just server or serverless? Some market niches will adopt serverless to avoid the expense of purshasing, deploying, and managing servers. Others will chose to keep the servers.
11:15 PM PT
The real advantage of the P2P VoIP systems is the increased robustness to failure. If more of the functionallity is pushed to the edges in a P2P fashion, what’s left at the core is simpler, and therefore easier to keep running.