Skip to main content
Architecture & Engineering

Serverless

Serverless is a model where code runs in short-lived instances the cloud provider creates on demand and destroys when idle, billed per invocation rather than per running server. There are still servers — the point is that capacity planning, patching and scaling become the provider's responsibility rather than yours.

The economics are the main draw and they are genuinely asymmetric. Workloads that are spiky, unpredictable or mostly idle cost dramatically less than a server sized for peak that runs continuously. Background jobs, webhook handlers and scheduled tasks are near-ideal fits.

The costs appear at the edges. A cold start adds latency when an idle function is invoked. Execution time limits make long-running work awkward. Database connections behave badly when hundreds of instances open them simultaneously, usually requiring a connection pooler. And at consistently high, steady traffic, per-invocation billing can exceed the cost of a reserved instance — so the model that saves money for one workload wastes it for another.

Codazz builds this in production — Cloud & DevOps.

FAQ

Serverless
FAQ.

Common questions about serverless.

Ask Us Anything

For spiky or low-utilisation workloads, usually much cheaper — you pay nothing while idle. For steady high-volume traffic it is often more expensive than a reserved instance, because per-invocation pricing has no volume floor. The deciding factor is your utilisation curve, so measure it before assuming either direction.

The delay when a request arrives and no warm instance exists, so the provider must create one — initialising the runtime and your code before handling the request. It typically adds tens to hundreds of milliseconds and matters most on user-facing paths. Keeping deployment bundles small and dependencies light is the main lever.

Related terms

Containerization

Containerization packages an application together with its dependencies, libraries and configuration into a single image that runs identically on any machine with a container runtime.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a system that runs containers across a cluster of machines, deciding where each one should run, restarting them when they fail, scaling them with demand, and routing traffic between them.

Event-Driven Architecture

Event-driven architecture is a design where components publish events describing something that happened, and other components react to them, without the publisher knowing who is listening.

Browse the full glossary →