You're here to learn a new skill, to expand your understanding of new ways of compute, and to follow along with the examples in this book to gain practical experience. Before we begin, it would be helpful to know a bit of the history and context behind why serverless exists. This chapter will explain the progression of thinking from the humble data center through to the new goalposts of serverless.

We'll learn how the placement of physical hardware has evolved from the perspective of the infrastructure engineer and developer, and how the different stages have allowed us to achieve new layers of compute abstraction. The evolution of these factors has also driven new ways of structuring software, and we will explore some of the reasons behind this.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Understanding enterprise data centers
• Exploring the units of compute
• Understanding software architectures
• Predicting what comes next

We will delve in these topics one by one and learn how each aspect functions.