When you upload a photo to a social media app and instantly see a thumbnail appear, there is a good chance a serverless function processed that image.

For decades, building a web application meant one thing: managing servers. You had to provision them, patch them, scale them, and worry about them crashing in the middle of the night.

Containerization with tools like Docker and Kubernetes made this easier, but you still had to manage the cluster.

Serverless architecture offers a radical shift. It’s a cloud computing model where developers can focus purely on writing business logic, while the cloud provider handles all the underlying infrastructure, from provisioning and scaling to maintenance and availability.

1. What Is Serverless Architecture?