The term “Serverless Architecture” refers to a setup where businesses develop and run applications without dealing with the underlying infrastructure. So, what does serverless mean to an end-user? There are no servers to provision or manage; it scales up as per increase in usage and scales down as usage decreases. Also, the end-user has to pay only for the time that the code is being executed. It has built-in high availability, fault tolerance, and auto-scalability. So, the service provider fully manages the provisioning, maintenance, and scaling of the infrastructure.
Monolithic vs. Microservices vs. Serverless
Monolithic Architecture
Monolithic applications are built as a single, unified unit. Traditionally, enterprise applications followed a three-tier structure: a client-side user interface, a server-side application, and a backend database. The server-side logic handles HTTP requests, communicates with the database, processes business logic, and renders HTML views to be returned to the client browser.
In this model, any change—no matter how small—requires rebuilding and redeploying the entire application. Because the application is tightly coupled and built using a single technology stack, scaling individual components is difficult and resource-intensive.
- Single codebase and deployment unit
- Tight coupling between components
- Difficult to scale and maintain
- Long development and release cycles
- High risk of cascading failures
Microservices Architecture
Microservices architecture breaks down a monolithic application into a collection of smaller, independent services. Each service encapsulates a specific business capability and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. These services often communicate over lightweight protocols such as HTTP or messaging queues and are typically containerized.
This decoupled architecture allows teams to work on different services using different technologies and deploy them without affecting the rest of the application. It offers greater flexibility and resilience, especially in large, complex systems.
- Independent services with dedicated responsibilities
- Services run in separate containers
- Easier to scale individual components
- Promotes polyglot programming (multiple languages and frameworks)
- Faster development and deployment cycles
Serverless Architecture
Serverless takes modularization to the next level by abstracting infrastructure completely and breaking applications into individual functions triggered by events. Developers write business logic as functions, while the cloud provider handles provisioning, scaling, and server management.
Functions are stateless and ephemeral—executed only when triggered and scaled automatically based on demand. This model is ideal for lightweight, event-driven workloads and provides high cost-efficiency through pay-per-use pricing.
- No infrastructure management needed
- Functions are triggered by events (e.g., HTTP requests, file uploads)
- Auto-scaling and high availability built-in
- Cost-effective pay only for execution time
- Ideal for rapid development and micro-tasks
Evolution of Serverless
The journey toward serverless computing reflects the broader evolution of application development and deployment—from hardware-bound systems to fully abstracted, on-demand execution models. This shift has been driven by the need for greater agility, scalability, and developer productivity.
1. Early Computing: Hardware-Tied Systems
Initially, operating systems were tightly coupled with hardware. Any OS upgrade often required a corresponding hardware change, making the setup rigid and inflexible.
- OS and hardware dependency
- Limited portability and scalability
- Static, resource-heavy deployments
2. Virtual Machines (VMs): OS-Level Abstraction
As operating systems matured, applications began to depend on specific OS versions. This led to the rise of Virtual Machines, which abstracted the hardware and allowed multiple OS environments to run on a single physical server.
- Enabled OS-level isolation
- Improved hardware utilization
- Still resource-intensive and slower to start
3. Containers: Lightweight Virtualization
To improve agility and reduce overhead, container-based virtualization emerged. Containers isolate applications while sharing the host OS kernel, making them lightweight and faster than VMs.
- Faster boot times compared to VMs
- Lightweight and portable
- Ideal for microservice architectures
- Still include redundant libraries and dependencies
4. Microservices and Container Optimization
With containers came microservices, where applications were broken into modular, independently deployable components. Each service could be updated or scaled without impacting the others.
- Increased modularity and scalability
- Language and framework flexibility
- Improved fault isolation
5. Backend as a Service (BaaS) and Function as a Service (FaaS)
The need to remove infrastructure management completely led to BaaS and later FaaS, the foundation of serverless computing. With FaaS, developers focus solely on writing code that executes in response to events—no need to manage servers, scaling, or provisioning.
- No server management required
- Event-driven and stateless functions
- Auto-scaling and pay-per-use pricing
- Ideal for real-time, modular, and scalable apps
6. Current Trends and Future of Serverless
Today, serverless is evolving rapidly, driven by the growing complexity of applications and the demand for faster delivery. It enables teams to build and deploy features independently using the best-suited tools and languages, accelerating innovation.
- Supports rapid development and deployment
- Seamlessly integrates with cloud-native services
- Continues to evolve toward more granular, flexible, and cost-efficient models
- Ideal for real-time, modular, and scalable apps
The growth of Serverless as a culture
Serverless is an evolution of the trend towards a higher level of abstraction in cloud programming models. It is currently represented by “Function as a Service” (FaaS), where developers write small stateless code snippets and allow the platform to manage the complexities of executing the function.
Serverless is gaining traction in both enterprise and startup environments at a pace much faster than seen with containers, which was the last widespread industry adoption rollout. More and more backend developers are now using serverless platforms. Almost 1/5th (19%) of all backend developers currently use serverless platforms; this percentage has jumped 3 points in the last 6 months, indicating the fast growth rate in serverless architecture! It’s almost as famous as the use of virtual machines now, as per the quarterly survey from Developer Economics.
Moreover, Cloudability’s State of the Cloud 2018 report that analyzed the IT spending of 1,500 organizations in 2017 showed a serverless quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 667%. Not to be left behind, social media also shows the immense popularity of serverless technology, with hundreds of tweets every hour being hash-tagged with “serverless.” Even Google Trends has reported a steady rise in the number of times this architecture is being looked up! This graphical representation can best understand the amount of traction that serverless is getting.
By adopting serverless architectures, customers have taken their products from ideation to production in no time compared to the traditional approach. Most cloud providers have released their serverless platforms, and there is a tremendous amount of investment and attention around this space in the industry.
Speeding up development with Serverless
Serverless architecture is fundamentally changing how organizations approach software development. When combined with an agile development culture, it transforms business application delivery by accelerating development cycles and minimizing infrastructure concerns.
1. Event-Driven Execution
- Clients trigger on-demand serverless functions.
- No infrastructure management for developers.
- Pay only for function execution.
2. Faster Development Cycles
- Self-service environments speed up feature rollout.
- Smaller, frequent deployments reduce downtime.
- Auto-scaling handles traffic spikes automatically.
3. Operational Simplicity
- Logging, monitoring, and scaling managed by the provider.
- Less time spent on testing for load or failure.
4. Rapid Prototyping
- Standard cloud components reduce design decisions.
- Reusable, scalable modules speed up integration and testing.
5. Continuous Delivery
- CI/CD supports faster response to business needs.
- Cloud services replace custom-built features.
Leading players in the Serverless space
New players are entering this space rapidly, but as one would expect, the largest cloud providers have the most extensive set of geographical locations and supporting resources for hosting serverless applications.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is the best-known vendor host for such a service in the current scenario. It is one of the first and most mature platforms with a stable serverless framework available in the market today. On AWS Lambda, one can deploy pure functions in Java, C#, Node.js, Python, and many more.
Over a dozen AWS cloud services are integrated with Lambda, and the list keeps growing! Amazon offers an interactive console and command-line tools for easy uploading and managing the snippets.
Microsoft Azure Functions
Microsoft’s Azure platform has been rapidly expanding in recent years. It is aggressively competing with AWS for a share of the serverless market. The list of supported resources largely parallels what AWS is offering, but Azure Functions also provides a few additional features specific to the .NET and Typescript audiences.
Google Cloud Functions
Google Cloud Functions largely follows Azure and AWS in feature parity, with few notable differences.
Summary
While serverless architecture may not be a solution to every IT problem, it indeed represents the future of many kinds of computing solutions in the coming years. Serverless has not gone mainstream yet, but it is bound to get a lot more traction in the years to come. However, the benefits of serverless architecture include easier operational management with reduced operating and development costs. But it might not be the correct approach for every problem, so one should be wary of anyone who claims that it will replace all our existing architectures.
