A systematic review by researchers analyzed 164 distinct articles on serverless computing, reflecting its academic focus. This model shifts fundamental responsibilities for building and running applications from development teams to cloud providers, evolving cloud services.

Serverless computing changes how organizations pay for, scale, and maintain digital services by enabling teams to deploy code that executes only in response to specific events, rather than continuously managing servers. This approach directly impacts operational costs, developer productivity, and feature launch speed. Despite the initial 'hype' concluding, as noted by Built In, its practical adoption grows for efficient, scalable operations.

What Is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing is a cloud execution model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation and provisioning of servers for a customer's application. Despite the name, servers are still involved in the process. The key distinction is that developers and system administrators do not need to concern themselves with the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider handles all the work of managing the server hardware, operating systems, and other backend components, allowing developers to focus exclusively on writing and deploying code.

An effective analogy is the difference between owning a car and using a ride-sharing service. Owning a car (a traditional server model) requires a significant upfront investment and ongoing responsibilities for maintenance, fuel, insurance, and parking. You pay for the car whether you are driving it or not. A ride-sharing service (the serverless model) allows you to simply request a ride when you need one. You only pay for the distance you travel, and the service provider handles all vehicle maintenance, management, and logistics. Serverless computing operates on a similar principle of on-demand, pay-per-use access to resources.

  • Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS): This service provides developers with pre-built backend components like cloud storage, user authentication, and database management. Developers integrate these services into their applications via APIs, offloading common backend tasks without having to write the server-side code themselves.
  • Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS): This is the most common form of serverless computing. FaaS allows developers to upload small, discrete blocks of code—or functions—that are triggered by specific events. For example, an event could be an HTTP request from a web browser, a new file being uploaded to cloud storage, or a message added to a queue. The cloud provider executes the function and then shuts it down, billing only for the milliseconds the code was running.