Introduction to serverless

As much as it is a buzzword, the term serverless has been used in more ways than you can imagine. But what is serverless? Why would anyone want to go serverless? Before we talk about something being serverless, let's understand what a server is. In Chapter 4, Monitoring AWS Compute Services, we talked about monitoring compute services, so an example of a server is an EC2 instance. In the EC2 scenario, you will be in charge of performing operating system updates, security patches, network security, scaling of applications deployed in EC2 instances, and every other operation you need to perform to keep the application up and running.

What serverless means is that you do not have to worry about all the operational work involved in managing the server. In serverless computing, you focus only on the application that has been built and deployed. You do not have to worry about scaling the server; the serverless design performs the scaling based on the...