Serverless architecture was born through the initiative of Amazon. The company was looking to promote an environment wherein a development team could be autonomous, small, and self-managed, allowing it to work on the whole software development cycle, from writing the code to shipping and delivering to production environments.
Serverless architecture is sometimes misunderstood as the concept of software systems that are deployed without the need for a physical server. To understand this idea, you can review the definition of serverless in Martin Fowler's blog:
- https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
Common examples of serverless and FaaS include:
- Authentication
- SMS notifications
- Email services
On the other hand, within a serverless world, it's common to create applications in which third-party services are adopted as a part of the system (rather than creating services from scratch). These services are commonly known as backend as a service (BaaS) or mobile backend as a service (MBaaS).
Following the same approach, we can code our custom business logic in the form of functions that can be deployed on the cloud. These services are known as function as a service (FaaS).
The following diagram illustrates how third-party services and custom functions are created, deployed, and consumed by different software systems:
