Serverless Computing: A Quantum Leap in Web Development

Serverless Computing - the next generation of cloud computing - has fundamentally changed the way application backends are handled. Applications can now be developed with greater cost efficiency, scalability, security and reliability.

Traditional server structures with server hardware in racks will soon be a thing of the past. The breakthrough in server technology began in 2000, when VMware’s virtualization technology enabled multiple server instances to be installed on a single physical machine. This allowed applications to run completely separate from other applications with independent computing resources on virtual private servers (VPS). This improved utilization of hardware resources meant that new applications could be installed more smoothly and at lower cost.

The launch of computing-on-demand models, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) half a decade later, enabled companies for the first time to rent computing and server capacity on an as-needed basis - and thus flexibly adapt their resources and applications to current workloads.

But despite these innovations, the servers underlying an application still needed to be managed, maintained and configured - whether they were physical or virtual machines.

The true revolution for serverless computing was the introduction of Lambda functionality by AWS. With Lambdas, powered by AWS, any user can execute code without owning a server. AWS takes full care of the computing resources, including security, availability and scalability. The user can concentrate fully on the code instead of on the technical infrastructure.

This opens up completely new possibilities for web development. Today, developers can use React to build a powerful website or application and communicate directly with a backend without the need for a server. Backend and frontend use JavaScript. Because no investment in server infrastructure is required, the technical hurdles that caused many new web startups to fail are eliminated.

Of course, the new technology approach has also improved the user experience for the end-user. Behind today’s web applications and websites, there are often large teams of web designers, developers, user interface and user experience specialists, ecommerce experts, content developers, etc. So, an entire industry has emerged around the topic of user experience (UX). And this is reflected in a more user-friendly application for the end-user. The expectations of web and mobile applications are correspondingly much higher. Users want super-fast, dynamic and highly interactive Web experiences - challenging developers to find ever new ways to meet these rising expectations.