Serverless

Three strengths

• No servers to manage. The cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure, including maintenance, capacity, scaling and patching. 2
• Pay for what runs. Charges follow the requests served and the compute time used, not hours of idle waiting. 3
• Scales on its own. Each request is handled independently, so the service scales up to match demand. 2

What it is

Traditionally, running software meant renting a server, a computer that sits in a data centre waiting for requests, and keeping it on, patched and big enough for your busiest day. You paid for it whether anyone used it or not. Serverless flips that arrangement. The servers still exist, but the cloud provider owns, runs and scales them, and you supply only the code. Researchers at UC Berkeley put it this way in 2019: serverless computing "handles virtually all the system administration operations", and they predicted it would "grow to dominate the future of cloud computing". 1

The idea took off with AWS Lambda, which Amazon announced in November 2014 as a service that runs a developer's code in response to events and manages the computing resources automatically. 3 An event is anything that happens: a file uploaded, a form submitted, a payment received, a message arriving.

Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, summed up the pitch at the launch: "You have to run no servers, no instances, nothing." 4 Lambda today is a service where you "run code without provisioning or managing servers". 2 Microsoft offers the same idea as Azure Functions, a serverless service that runs event-driven code so you can focus on the code that matters. 5

Because the provider only runs your code when something triggers it, the billing follows. Lambda's launch announcement said developers "pay only for the requests served and compute time required to run their code". 3 There's a sensible trade-off to know about: each run is short and independent, so work that needs to run for a long stretch or remember things between steps is arranged differently. 2

Doing this well also takes tooling. The Serverless Framework is a tool that deploys application code and the cloud infrastructure it needs together, using a short configuration file. 6

We choose it because most of what a business app does is respond to something: a customer clicks, a record changes, a payment lands. Serverless pays for exactly that.

How we use it

Serverless is the default approach for our software builds. We write the behind-the-scenes code as small functions, usually in TypeScript on Node.js or in Python, and run them on AWS Lambda first and Azure Functions where a client's systems sit in Azure. We use the Serverless Framework to deploy to both.

In Software Development, that gives you scalable design: your app handles a quiet Tuesday and a busy launch day without us resizing a server, and you pay for what's used. In Solution Architecture, it's one of the building blocks we reach for when we plan a system that needs to stay scalable and resilient. We often add WebSockets for live features, and event-driven serverless pipelines carry real-time data.

References

1. Eric Jonas et al., "Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing", arXiv:1902.03383, University of California, Berkeley, 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03383 (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. Amazon Web Services, "What is AWS Lambda?", AWS Lambda Developer Guide. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Amazon Web Services, "Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Lambda", press release, 13 November 2014. https://press.aboutamazon.com/2014/11/amazon-web-services-announces-aws-lambda (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. Neil McAllister, "The Lambda that roared: Amazon unveils hands-free, event-driven compute service", The Register, 13 November 2014. https://www.theregister.com/2014/11/13/the_lambda_that_roared_amazon_unveils_handsfree_eventdriven_compute_service/ (accessed 28 October 2026)
5. Microsoft, "Azure Functions overview", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-overview (accessed 28 October 2026)
6. Serverless, Inc., "Serverless Framework Documentation", serverless.com. https://www.serverless.com/framework/docs (accessed 28 October 2026)