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What is Serverless?

Published on May 24, 2022
Alex Garnett

By Alex Garnett

Senior DevOps Technical Writer

What is Serverless?

Serverless architecture allows backend web services to be implemented on an as-needed basis. Rather than needing to maintain your own server configuration, architecting your software for serverless providers can minimize the overhead involved. Serverless applications are typically deployed from a Git repository into an environment that can scale up or down as needed.

This means that serverless functions can effectively “scale to zero” – a function or endpoint should consume no resources at all as long as it is not being accessed. A serverless application can be a single function, written in a language that is interpreted by your serverless computing provider (usually Go, Python, and JavaScript), as long as it can return some output. Although each serverless computing platform is essentially proprietary in terms of its runtime environment, they implement similar tools and similar principles.

To learn more about Serverless functions, you can refer to the following resources:

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About the author

Alex Garnett
Alex Garnett
Author
Senior DevOps Technical Writer
See author profile

Former Senior DevOps Technical Writer at DigitalOcean. Expertise in topics including Ubuntu 22.04, Linux, Rocky Linux, Debian 11, and more.

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