Serverless
At a high level, serverless is an event-driven computing model where you write small functions that execute when an event triggers them. That’s a lot of jargon, and we’ll explain it all in a second, however, there’s a couple of things we need to address before getting into the detail.
- The terms serverless and Function as a Service (FaaS) refer to the same thing
- Serverless uses servers
Point 2 raises the obvious question; if serverless uses servers, why do we call it serverless?
The answer is simple, the servers are hidden so well that we never have to think about them. Think about it like this… before cloud computing we spent a lot of time and energy working with servers. We had to buy them, rack and stack them, pay for maintenance contracts, and even replace them when they failed or got too old and slow. The cloud came along and took most of the server work away. Finally, along came serverless and took all of the server work away. So...