api: YAML JSON TOON Database
version: 1.0.0
format: json
dataset:
  slug: serverless-computing
  title: Serverless Computing
  description: Concepts and terms for serverless architectures.
  summary: "The core ideas of serverless computing: functions as a service, event-driven execution, cold starts, statelessness, API gateways and pay-per-use billing, plus the operational concepts that matter in practice: concurrency, timeouts, idempotency, scale to zero and lock-in."
  use_when:
    - You are deciding whether a workload fits a serverless model.
    - You need the vocabulary for reading a serverless platform's documentation.
  caveats:
    - Serverless suits bursty, event-driven work; steady high-throughput workloads can be cheaper on long-running servers.
    - Limits on duration, memory and concurrency are provider-specific and change over time.
  related:
    - serverless-patterns
    - cloud-service-models
    - container-orchestration
  category: Cloud Computing
  category_slug: cloud-computing
  tags: cloud,serverless,functions
  view_count: 0
  entry_count: 13
  fields:
    - section: data
      field: concept
      type: string
      example: Function as a Service
    - section: data
      field: description
      type: string
      example: Event-driven functions executed in ephemeral co…
data:
  - concept: Function as a Service
    description: Event-driven functions executed in ephemeral containers.
  - concept: Event-Driven
    description: Functions triggered by events such as HTTP requests or queue messages.
  - concept: Cold Start
    description: Latency from initializing a function runtime after idle time.
  - concept: Stateless
    description: Functions do not retain state between invocations.
  - concept: API Gateway
    description: Managed service routing HTTP requests to functions.
  - concept: Pay-Per-Use
    description: Billing based on actual execution time and request count.
  - concept: Provisioned Concurrency
    description: Keeping a set number of function instances warm to avoid cold-start latency, at a fixed cost.
  - concept: Function Timeout
    description: The maximum time one invocation may run before the platform stops it.
  - concept: Idempotency
    description: Designing handlers so repeated delivery of the same event has the same effect as one, since many triggers are at-least-once.
  - concept: Scale to Zero
    description: Running no instances, and paying nothing, when there is no traffic.
  - concept: Edge Functions
    description: Functions executed in many locations close to users, typically with tighter runtime limits.
  - concept: Vendor Lock-In
    description: Reliance on proprietary triggers, SDKs and managed services that makes moving to another provider costly.
  - concept: Container-Based Functions
    description: Serverless platforms that run a container image on demand and scale it automatically, for example Google Cloud Run.