1 Introduction to serverless with Claudia

Serverless is a method of deploying and running applications on cloud infrastructure, on a pay-per-use basis and without renting or buying servers. Instead of you, the serverless platform provider is responsible for capacity planning, scaling, balancing, and monitoring; the provider is also able to treat your applications as functions.

Wait, no servers? Seems like a new buzzword, a hipster cloud trend promising to revolutionize your life for the better.

This book explains what serverless is, what problems it solves, and where it does or doesn’t fit into your application development process, without fanboyishly showing off and selling serverless like some trendy cloud cult that everyone needs to follow. It does so with a pragmatic approach, explaining the concepts by teaching you how to build reliable and scalable serverless applications with Node.js and Claudia.js, while saving time and resources.

This chapter focuses on the concepts of serverless: what it is, why it matters, and how it compares to server-hosted web application development. Your main goal for this chapter is to gain a good understanding of basic serverless concepts and build a good foundation.

1.1 Servers and washing machines

1.2 The core concepts

1.3 How does serverless work?

1.4 Serverless in practice

1.4.1 Aunt Maria’s serverless pizzeria

1.4.2 A common approach

1.4.3 Serverless approach

1.5 Serverless infrastructure — AWS

1.6 What is Claudia, and how does it fit?

1.7 When and where you should use it

Summary