When I hear the word "service" I think of something that just runs in background and you can do stuff with it. I have no idea how to create one, I almost had to make one on Android and use it properly, now I'm back to Windows and Java and we have something working as a service, I have no idea how it was created and how it does work, I just know how to start, restart and stop it. If you asked me how it works and how to communicate with it - XD no idea lol but let me google that. I have almost 4 years of professional software development experience.

And at this point I'm too afraid to ask ;____;

services are services (and not just “startup apps”) because they get spawned right at kernel startup. Necessary bc they’re loading bedrock-low level code like whatever decides wether this group of circuitry should get 1.1 volts of juice for 0.25 seconds or 1.2 volts for 0.2 seconds. Too far from yarn for me.

@Chainslut aaaaand I guess that is some sort of specific service. But what am I supposed to think when I hear Software as a Service? I have no idea what does one mean by saying that, what architectural concepts does this thing fulfill, how does it differ from a typical API that you can communicate with, seems really like a buzzword, yet there is a bit of jobs in that area

@Xirate that’s just marketing by people who Unironically call themselves creative visionaries/thought leaders, and genuinely feel good bc their Starbucks barrista knows that they like paprika on their cabbage latte. They would also call it Beef-as-a-Tortoise or Bambooware-cucumber-dare if that was the current flavor of being the thoughtiest of thought leaders but alas not today, no, today, SaaS is how you make it.

A service in software dev is anything that runs "detached" from the "default process". Usually you would run a low-level OS command in a terminal, but the service runs it detached from a terminal instance.

Similarly, the term Software as a Service is not pretentious: it is running a part of your business/IT process detached from the default process (running it on your own (cluster of) servers.

I don't remember exactly but creating services on Windows & Linux is really trivial, takes just a config file and a few commands

https://devtut.github.io/python/...

There is also tuts out there for daemons in Linux. Once you find a framework they are pretty simple. I am sure there are any number of tuts for x language in y OS.

Normal software: Runs in the foreground via a GUI or on the command line. You interact with it where you launched it.

Services: run in the background. Need to interact with it through some kind of API, either a separate command line program, REST/GraphQL, RPC, piping echo into netcat, whatever.

SaaS is a marketing term which means we dont have people who serve you, we have software that helps you serve yourself.

@Xirate I see SaaS only as a (business/commercial) concept that does not imply anything specific re architecture, language, design etc.

Real world analogy:
1) You buy a car, pay rego, insurance, fuel it, wash it, fix it and occasionally you also drive it. You realise that just to have it you monthly pay 100 units of your local currency. You own that car and when it's not driven it either depreciates or even costs (parking/garage, spare parts)

2) Then one day while sitting in a car on a freeway that is currently a parking lot you see a billboard "Tired of paying for a car that is parked 20 out of 24h per day. Call [insert car sharing company]"

The 2nd example is a concept of Car As A Service. You don't own it, you don't pay for fuel, rego, insurance, repairs... you monthly pay 20 of your local currency and the car is always ready when you need it.

Clearly with car availability that's a bit of a stretch but software is 24/7 available unless your SaaS provider is cheap on servers 😊

If you extrapolate that idea, you can see that a coffee shop is Coffee As A Service, a pub is a Beer&Wine As A Service and so on.

so the concept is quite old but the sockless MBAs are getting off on using buzzwords in order to justify their titles, salaries and the air they breathe.