Serverless computing

Serverless computing, also known as Function as a Service (FaaS), is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages starting and stopping virtual machines as necessary to serve requests, and requests are billed by an abstract measure of the resources required to satisfy the request, rather than per virtual machine, per hour.

Despite the name, it does not actually involve running code without servers. Serverless computing is so named because the business or person that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent or provision servers or virtual machines for the back-end code to run on.

Serverless code can be used in conjunction with code written in traditional server style, such as microservices. For example, part of a web application could be written as microservices and another part could be written as serverless code. Alternatively, an application could be written that uses no provisioned servers at all, being completely serverless.

Serverless code can either be triggered by specific events (such as user registration with Amazon Cognito), or be configured to run behind an API management platform in order to expose it as a REST API endpoint.

See also

• API management platform, a technology often used in conjunction with serverless systems
• Serverless Framework, a software framework for creating serverless systems on AWS Lambda with Node.js or Python
• Platform as a service (PaaS)

External links

• Serverless computing @ Wikipedia