🧠 Knowledge Series #21: What is serverless?
BaaS, FaaS and everything else you need to know
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Hi product people 👋,
You’ve probably heard the term serverless pop up in conversations with engineering and DevOps teams, but the term itself is a bit of a misnomer. Serverless actually doesn’t mean that no servers are involved in your product since that would be technically impossible.
What it does mean though, is that in a serverless set up your team are not responsible for the management of those servers. And if that’s the case, who is? And how does that work?
In this Knowledge Series, we’ll explore what serverless is, how it works and how it fits into other aspects of the tech stack.
Coming up:
What does serverless mean? The important bits worth knowing
Some real world examples
How serverless fits into a DevOps engineer’s role
Is serverless the future?
But first… what’s a server?
Here’s a picture of the world’s first web server:
If you look closely enough you’ll see a little sticker which says “this machine is a server, do not power it down!”. Back in the early 90s when this was developed at CERN, switching this machine off would have impacted all of the other machines in the network, but thankfully, there are now millions of servers all over the world.
But what is a web server?
Put simply, web server is a computer system that hosts websites and delivers web pages to users over the internet. When you type a website address into your browser, your browser sends a request to the web server hosting that site. The server then processes this request and sends back the requested web page, allowing you to view and interact with the content. Web servers use HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to communicate with browsers and can also host files, media, and applications.
↘️ For a full deep dive into how the web works check out the previous Knowledge Series on this.
In reality, what this means is that any information that is uploaded onto the web needs to be stored at a physical location on a machine. This can include a mix of: