Cloud · Cloud Fundamentals
Serverless
Event driven compute where the platform manages provisioning, scaling and patching, and you are billed per execution.
IntermediateUpdated 2026-09-01
Overview
Functions run in response to events, HTTP requests, queue messages, storage changes, schedules, and scale to zero when idle. Combined with managed queues, APIs and databases, they remove most infrastructure operations from a workload.
Trade offs include cold start latency, execution time limits, per invocation observability challenges and the need to design for idempotency, since events can be delivered more than once.
Security considerations
- Give each function its own least privilege identity rather than sharing a broad role.
- Validate all event input; functions are directly reachable by whatever can publish the event.