InfoQ Homepage Articles Being Functionless: How to Develop a Serverless Mindset to Write L

Being Functionless: How to Develop a Serverless Mindset to Write Less Code!

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2025-01-05 05:30:03

InfoQ Homepage Articles Being Functionless: How to Develop a Serverless Mindset to Write Less Code!

Services operated and managed by cloud providers - known as fully managed services - are not new. For example, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) are fully managed services from AWS and are nearly two decades old.

As platforms and infrastructure became available as services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and other cloud providers, it promoted the growth of independent software vendors (ISVs) offering several products as Software as a Service (SaaS).

Though the term serverless appeared in 2012 - inspired by the evolving cloud landscape and how SaaS applications eliminated the need to own and manage physical hardware - its association with the existing fully managed cloud services wasn’t evident.

While the growth of the SaaS market was fueling innovations, the industry was missing a crucial piece in the managed services repertoire - a fully managed compute service in the cloud. In 2014, when Amazon released AWS Lambda - the fully managed compute service in the cloud, popularly known as Function as a Service (FaaS) - it changed the cloud industry forever, instantly elevating serverless to new heights! Soon after, Microsoft and Google followed with their FaaS offerings, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions, respectively.