What Is Serverless Computing?

“Serverless computing is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider manages the underlying servers, infrastructure, and capacity required to run applications. Developers focus primarily on application code while the provider handles infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and much of the server management. Despite the name, servers still exist—they are simply managed by the cloud provider.”

Serverless Computing: Overview

Managing servers can require infrastructure provisioning, capacity planning, patching, and scaling. For applications with changing workloads, maintaining infrastructure can also create unnecessary operational effort.

Serverless computing shifts much of this infrastructure management to the cloud provider.

How Does Serverless Computing Work?

Instead of continuously running and managing servers, developers deploy application code as functions or use managed cloud services.

When an event occurs, such as:

• An API request
• A file upload
• A database event
• A scheduled task
• A message arriving in a queue

the required code can be executed by the cloud platform.

The provider manages the underlying infrastructure and scales resources based on demand according to the service model.

Benefits of Serverless Computing

Businesses can benefit from:

• Reduced server management
• Automatic scaling for suitable workloads
• Faster application development
• Less infrastructure provisioning
• Usage-based pricing for many serverless services
• Easier event-driven application development

When Should You Use Serverless?

Serverless can work well for:

• APIs
• Web backends
• Event processing
• Scheduled jobs
• File processing
• Data processing
• Automation workflows

It may not be ideal for every workload. Applications requiring long-running processes, highly predictable infrastructure behavior, specialized hardware, or fine-grained infrastructure control may need other approaches.

Final Thoughts

Serverless computing does not eliminate infrastructure. It changes who manages it. For suitable workloads, it allows development teams to focus more on application functionality while the cloud provider handles much of the underlying infrastructure.