Technology often introduces a jargon of words and before we can truly understand what that means, more new technology has come and gone. This is getting changed around in this Internet era. So, lemme help you understand what’s the new buzzword “Serverless” is all about.

You spend a good deal of time building and deploying apps, but 3/4th of your time is spent managing them.

What exactly is Serverless? When I first heard the term, here is what popped into my head, “Is it less Server or no server?!”. Ironically, Serverless involves servers but you don’t have to manage them, somebody else (cloud-providers) will do that for you. Also it is a cloud-based execution model (It defines how a work takes place). The code runs in containers that are event-triggered and managed by your cloud provider. How could this be cost-effective? You are only metered for the execution and not for the capacity. i.e., You are only charged when your code is instantiated unto it ends execution.

Applications that significantly depend on third-party services (BaaS) or on custom code that runs in ephemeral containers (FaaS) are the ones that fall under Serverless.

As a developer, you can focus on your product rather than worrying about managing operating servers or runtimes both on and off cloud (a win-win situation). And tbh, the modern infrastructure could be overwhelming and if you look at it closely, organizations are spending a rather lot of time debugging and managing the infrastructure. So to clearly define this, we can say that Serverless is a combination of BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) and FaaS (Function-as-a-Service).

Serverless lets you build applications with more flexibility and agility in a budget you don’t have to fret about. Serverless promises possibilities for carrying out business needs in a much more ideal manner.

It is not that servers are troublesome except they are time-consuming. Servers act as computers that accept requests from client machines and delivers data. Web servers, FTP servers, email servers are all examples of server computing. Consider a web server. When a user needs to access a page on the internet. She/He does this by sending requests to the webserver through a browser. The web server sends data based on the request.

With its ideal business nature, some might mistaken Serverless to be a conceptual fantasy whereas, enterprises are implementing them, NOW. Here are some Serverless Service Providers AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk, Alibaba Function Compute, Auth0 Webtask, Kubeless. Who uses these? Only popular sites like Netflix, Telenor etc., use this. Native cloud providers allow to insert, update and deploy code so that the company’s need not worry about the infrastructures & security.

No physical server is involved. Since you are not going to maintain these physically, you need not worry about management and scalability. You will be allocated resources based on your demands & requirements. You don’t have to pay for idle time only for the time you run & deploy your code. Eliminating the need for pre/over — provision, and storage capacity cost.

Serverless could benefit almost every organization. However, if you are still having thoughts about that you can try out by little before investing your energy. You may think that Serverless is just another hype, it may or may not be however the concepts behind this has a much higher possibility when combined with what other technologies both evolving & evolved are about to offer.