Serverless

The name is a lie. There are absolutely servers. You just don't have to think about them.

Traditionally, running a website or app meant managing servers. You'd rent a computer in the cloud, install your software, keep it updated, make sure it didn't crash, and pay for it 24/7 — even when nobody was using it at 3 AM. It's like owning a car: insurance, maintenance, gas, parking — all your problem.

Serverless flips that. You just write your code and upload it. The cloud provider handles everything else — the servers, the scaling, the uptime, all of it. Your code runs when someone needs it and sits dormant when they don't. You only pay for actual usage. It's like taking an Uber — you pay per ride, not per month, and you never think about oil changes.

Because serverless is why small teams can build apps that serve millions of users without a dedicated infrastructure team. If you ever build something with AI (or any web tool), serverless platforms like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, or AWS Lambda let you go from idea to live product without becoming a server administrator. It removes a massive barrier to getting stuff out the door.

Serverless computing abstracts server management, with the cloud provider dynamically allocating resources per request. FaaS (Function as a Service) platforms include AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and Cloudflare Workers. Key characteristics: event-driven execution, automatic scaling to zero, pay-per-invocation pricing, and stateless functions. Trade-offs include cold start latency, execution time limits, vendor lock-in, and debugging complexity. Edge computing extends serverless to CDN nodes for lower latency.