- Serverless was first used to describe applications that significantly or fully depend on 3rd party applications / services (‘in the cloud’) to manage server-side logic and state. These are typically ‘rich client’ applications (think single page web apps, or mobile apps) that use the vast ecosystem of cloud accessible databases (like Parse, Firebase), authentication services (Auth0, AWS Cognito), etc. These types of services have been previously described as ‘(Mobile) Backend as a Service’, and I’ll be using ‘BaaS’ as a shorthand in the rest of this article.
- Serverless can also mean applications where some amount of server-side logic is still written by the application developer but unlike traditional architectures is run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one invocation), and fully managed by a 3rd party. (Thanks to ThoughtWorks for their definition in their most recent Tech Radar.) One way to think of this is ‘Functions as a service / FaaS’ . AWS Lambda is one of the most popular implementations of FaaS at present, but there are others. I’ll be using ‘FaaS’ as a shorthand for this meaning of Serverless throughout the rest of this article."
Let’s think about a traditional 3-tier client-oriented system with server-side logic. A good example is a typical ecommerce app (dare I say an online pet store?)
Traditionally the architecture will look something like this, and let’s say it’s implemented in Java on the server side, with a HTML / Javascript component as the client:
With this architecture the client can be relatively unintelligent, with much of the logic in the system - authentication, page navigation, searching, transactions - implemented by the server application.
With a Serverless architecture this may end up looking more like this:
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