Over the past two decades, considerable innovation has gone into making sure developers don’t have to think much about the underlying physical machine their code runs on. Serverless computing is a paradigm that takes this objective to its logical conclusion. With serverless, you don’t have to know anything about the hardware or operating system your code runs on, as it’s all managed for you by a service provider. While the segment has had its ups and downs, it’s currently on the upswing: A recent report from SkyQuest technology projected that serverless computing would be a $50 billion market by 2031.
What is serverless computing?
Serverless computing is an execution model for the cloud in which a cloud provider dynamically allocates only the compute resources and storage needed to execute a particular piece of code. Naturally, there are still servers involved, but the provider manages the provisioning and maintenance. The user is charged for the resources consumed along with the maintenance and whatever other fees might be tacked on. In an ideal serverless scenario, there would be no servers to manage or provision at all: No bare metal, nothing virtual, no containers. Serverless users are not involved with managing a host, patching a host, or dealing with anything on an operating system level.
Serverless has been used to describe back-end-as-a-service scenarios, where a mobile app would connect to a back-end server hosted entirely in the cloud. But when people talk about serverless computing or serverless architectures, they usually mean function-as-a-service (FaaS), in which a customer writes code that only tackles business logic and uploads it to a provider. That’s our definition for this article: The provider handles all the hardware provisioning, virtual machine and container management, and even tasks like multithreading that often are built into application code. All that’s left to do is provide the functions that specifically implement the application’s business logic.