In this section, you will see the use of the term compute instead of the server, as nowadays software deployments are not limited to servers. A public cloud provider such as AWS has serverless offerings, where you don't need a server to run your application. One of the most popular FaaS offerings is AWS Lambda. Similar to AWS Lambda, other popular public cloud providers extend their offerings in FaaS space—for example, Microsoft Azure has Azure Functions and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers Google Cloud functions.

However, organizations still make the default choice to go for servers with virtual machines. Now, containers are also becoming popular as the need for automation and resource utilization is increased. Containers are becoming the preferred choice, especially in the area of microservice application deployment. The optimal choice of computing—whether you want to choose server instances, containers, or go for serverless—depends upon application use cases. Let's look at the various compute choices available.