Serverless
Running code as functions the cloud starts on demand and bills per request, with no servers for you to manage, scaling down to zero when idle.
AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and similar platforms fit spiky or event-triggered work: webhooks, scheduled jobs, APIs with uneven traffic. The costs are cold starts on some platforms, limits on run time and memory, harder local debugging, and lock-in to the provider’s services. At steady high load, per-request billing can cost more than a server that is always on.
Related terms
- Edge computing (Workers): Running code in data centers close to the user, on the CDN, instead of in one central region.
- Durable execution: Running a long process so its progress is saved after every step, letting it survive crashes and pause for hours or days, then resume.
- Backpressure: A slow consumer signaling upstream to slow down, instead of buffering work until memory or the queue runs out.
