Serverless and Functions as a Service

When you say serverless to someone, the first conclusion they jump to is that you are running your code without any servers.

This can be quite a valid conclusion if you are using one of the public cloud services we will be discussing later in this chapter. However, when it comes to running in your own environment, you can't avoid having to run on a server of some sort.

Before we discuss what we mean by serverless and Functions as a Service, we should discuss how we got here. As people who work with me will no doubt tell you, I like to use the pets versus cattle analogy a lot as this is quite an easy way to explain the differences in modern cloud infrastructures versus a more traditional approach.