Cloud & DevOps
Serverless is a cloud execution model in which developers deploy individual functions or applications without provisioning or managing servers — the cloud provider automatically allocates compute resources on demand and charges only for actual execution time.
Despite the name, serverless does use servers — but all server management (provisioning, patching, scaling, availability) is abstracted away by the cloud provider. Developers write functions (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions) that are triggered by events — an HTTP request, a file upload, a database change, or a queue message — and the platform scales from zero to thousands of concurrent executions automatically. Serverless is economically efficient for workloads with variable or unpredictable traffic: you pay only for the milliseconds your code runs, with no idle server costs. Limitations include cold start latency (the first invocation after idle periods takes slightly longer), maximum execution duration, and constraints on stateful operations — making serverless best suited for stateless, event-driven workloads rather than long-running processes.
Example
An image processing pipeline uses AWS Lambda functions triggered by S3 upload events to automatically resize and optimise every photo uploaded by users, scaling from 1 to 10,000 concurrent executions during a product launch without any infrastructure changes.
Related terms
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services — including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics — over the internet, enabling on-demand access, rapid scaling, and pay-per-use pricing.
API Gateway
An API gateway is a server that acts as the single entry point for all client requests in a distributed system, routing them to appropriate backend services while handling cross-cutting concerns like authentication, rate limiting, SSL termination, and request logging.
Microservices
Microservices is an architectural style in which a large application is built as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific business capability and communicating via APIs.
DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices, cultural principles, and tooling that unifies software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten delivery cycles, improve deployment frequency, and increase system reliability.
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