Serverless Computing
Serverless computing isn’t truly “serverless.” Sans tapping into some seriously dark arts, it’s impossible to provide computational resources without a physical server somewhere. Instead, this technology distributes those resources more effectively. When an application is not in use, no resources are allocated. When they are needed, the computing power auto-scales.
This technological shift means companies no longer need to worry over infrastructure or reserving bandwidth, which in turn promises the golden ticket of ease of use and cost savings.
As Eric Knorr, editor in chief of International Data
Group Enterprise, writes: “One of the beauties of this architecture is that you
get charged by the cloud provider only when a service runs. You don’t need to
pay for idle capacity—or even think about capacity. Basically, the runtime sits
idle waiting for an event to occur, whereupon the appropriate function gets
swapped into the runtime and executes. So you can build out a big, complex
application without incurring charges for anything until execution occurs.”