Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Functions as a Service

The term serverless is often thrown around these days, and is used to describe different things in different contexts. At its heart, serverless computing refers to a class of compute solutions that are highly managed, abstracting away large degrees of the underlying infrastructure used to host web services.

Initially, the term serverless was used to describe Functions as a Service (FaaS) and Backend as a Service (BaaS) solutions. Over time, the term has become somewhat of a buzzword in the software community, often used to describe any highly managed environment such as Platform as a Service and Software as a Service offerings. For the purposes of this chapter, we will be using the term in its classic form: to describe ...