What is Serverless?

Understanding Serverless Cloud Computing

Serverless computing is the most advanced and abstract concept in cloud hosting. But what exactly is it? How does it compare with IaaS and PaaS?

And is it really a panacea as some suggest?

Infrastructure and API

The first thing to understand is that serverless computing is a way to write code that executes in a non-developer managed context. The idea here is to offload as much as possible to the platform, leaving only the actual business logic to the coder.

The chief aim of serverless code is to expose APIs. We are constantly building infrastructure to host API, but we really just want to expose the API and connect it to our business logic.

What’s an API?

Step back for a moment: what is an API?

An API is simply a join-point for code. We think of this as an API “surface”, in the hopes that code that is related will exist inside a contained area, interacting with other similar code areas via their surface.

In code-speak, we call this encapsulation.

API’s exist at every level of code, from classes and functions on up. What we are most concerned about here is network APIs, sometimes blanket…