What Is Serverless?

Chapter 1. Introducing Serverless

In this chapter we’re first going to go on a little history lesson to see what led us to Serverless. Given that context we’ll describe what Serverless is. Finally we’ll close out by summarizing why Serverless is both part of the natural growth of the cloud, and a jolt to how we approach application delivery.

Setting the Stage

To place a technology like Serverless in its proper context, we must first outline the steps along its evolutionary path.

The Birth of the Cloud

Let’s travel back in time to 2006. No one has an iPhone yet, Ruby on Rails is a hot new programming environment, and Twitter is being launched. More germane to this report, however, is that many people are hosting their server-side applications on physical servers that they own and have racked in a data center.

In August of 2006 something happened which would fundamentally change this model. Amazon’s new IT Division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced the launch of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

EC2 was one of the first of many Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products. IaaS allows companies to rent compute capacity—that is, a host to run their internet-facing server applications—rather than buying their own machines. It also allows them to provision hosts just in time, with the delay from requesting a machine to its availability being in the order of minutes.

EC2’s five key advantages are:

Reduced labor cost

Before Infrastructure as a Service, companies needed to hire specific ...