- [What is Serverless](architecture.md#what-is-serverless)

- [What is Serverless](#what-is-serverless)

Like many trends in software, there’s no one clear view of what Serverless is. For starters, it encompasses two different but overlapping areas:

1. Serverless was first used to describe applications that significantly or fully incorporate third-party, cloud-hosted applications and services, 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 (e.g., Parse, Firebase), authentication services (e.g., Auth0, AWS Cognito), and so on. These types of services have been previously described as “(Mobile) Backend as a Service", and I use "BaaS" as shorthand in the rest of this article.

2. Serverless can also mean applications where server-side logic is still written by the application developer, but, unlike traditional architectures, it’s run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one invocation), and fully managed by a third party. One way to think of this is “Functions as a Service” or "FaaS". (Note: The original source for this name—a tweet by @marak—is no longer publicly available.) AWS Lambda is one of the most popular implementations of a Functions-as-a-Service platform at present, but there are many others, too.

- https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html