What Is Serverless? A Historical Overview and Technical Foundations

The article introduces a translated excerpt from Mike Roberts and John Chapin's book What Is Serverless , positioning it as an excellent resource for understanding serverless concepts and their significance in modern cloud computing.

It begins by recalling the 2006 landscape, when Ruby on Rails was popular, Web 2.0 dominated, and most back‑end services ran on on‑premise data centers or hosted servers.

In August 2006 Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the first Infrastructure‑as‑a‑Service (IaaS) offering, which allowed companies to rent virtual machines on demand. The article lists five key advantages of IaaS: reduced labor cost, lower risk, lower infrastructure cost, flexible scaling, and shortened delivery time.

These benefits illustrate the concept of infrastructure outsourcing, where generic infrastructure tasks are delegated to service providers, achieving economies of scale and technological innovation.

The narrative then follows the evolution of cloud computing: after IaaS came Platform‑as‑a‑Service (PaaS) such as Heroku and Cloud Foundry, and later Container‑as‑a‑Service (CaaS) like Docker, Google Container Engine, and AWS ECS. Together they form a broader "Compute as a Service" model.

With this background, the article introduces the Serverless era, describing it as the next major step in cloud evolution and another form of infrastructure outsourcing that inherits the same five advantages.

It clarifies that Serverless is not synonymous with Function‑as‑a‑Service (FaaS); rather, Serverless comprises both Backend‑as‑a‑Service (BaaS) and FaaS. BaaS replaces custom back‑end components with third‑party services (e.g., Auth0 for authentication, RDS for databases), while FaaS enables fine‑grained, event‑driven function execution.

The article explains BaaS in detail, emphasizing its API‑driven nature and its origins in mobile back‑end services, and lists typical BaaS offerings such as authentication, managed databases, messaging, and storage.

FaaS is described as an event‑driven compute model that eliminates the need for managing server instances or processes. The article includes diagrams (preserved as tags) showing traditional VM/container deployment versus FaaS function deployment and activation.

It then answers why both BaaS and FaaS are called Serverless: the common denominator is that developers no longer manage servers or server processes, even though the underlying infrastructure still exists.

Finally, the piece highlights the profound impact Serverless has on cloud computing—outsourcing host, OS, resource allocation, scaling, and even application logic—leading to significant cost and operational efficiency gains, while also requiring new architectural considerations such as event‑driven design and external state management.

The article concludes with a note about an upcoming Cloud Native Community Day event and provides bibliographic references to the original book.