What Is Serverless?

Serverless in the past

Serverless computing is the future. Or maybe it’s just the hype. It’s hard to tell right now, mostly because we don’t yet know what serverless is. For some, it’s about developing functions (nano services?). For others, it’s not worrying about infrastructure. Some claim that serverless is all about reducing cost, while some say that it’s about scalability.

We don’t think it’s about the size of the applications, even though the first attempts at serverless were mostly focused on functions. Forcing everyone to design their systems around functions is unrealistic and counterproductive. Instead, we think that serverless is mostly about externalizing maintenance of infrastructure and the up-time of the applications.

In the past, many have used third-party companies to manage their infrastructure and to monitor their systems, but that was ineffective. It required too many people who, because of the nature of the business, had no incentive to improve. Now, we’re getting a similar result, but instead of employing an army of people to manage and maintain our infrastructure and applications, we have systems capable of doing that. As a result, we only need a fraction of the people we needed before to support those systems.