Most probably, if you are reading this book, you have already heard about the serverless paradigm and the terms serverless engineering and serverless architecture. Nowadays, the way developers deploy applications has changed drastically, especially in the domain of data engineering and web development, thanks to event-based architectural designs, also called serverless architectures.

It is not uncommon to have idle resources and servers in production idle after the server workload has finished, or waiting for the next workload to come. This introduces a bit of redundancy in the infrastructure. What if there was no need for idle resources lying around when there is no workload? What if resources can be created when necessary and be destroyed once the work is done?

At the end of this chapter, you will understand how serverless architectures and functions as a service work, and how you can build them into your existing software infrastructure. You will also learn what microservices are, and decide whether microservices or serverless operations are well-suited for your architecture or not. You will also learn how to build serverless applications with Python on major cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure.

This chapter will cover the following points:

• Understanding serverless architectures
• Understanding microservices
• Serverless architectures don't have to be real-time only
• Pros and cons of serverless architectures