Serverless Apps in and out of the Cloud

To this point, we have mainly talked about serverless functions in the context of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. But there is no reason why a serverless function must run in a public cloud. In this section (serverless apps in and out of the cloud) we talk about running serverless apps in public clouds, private clouds, on hardware servers, or locally. We don’t talk about edge computing in this chapter but cover it as a separate topic in the next.

It is tempting to think of serverless applications as necessarily bound to the cloud. But as we saw in the definition of serverless apps, no feature locks serverless applications to a public cloud. Serverless is popular in Kubernetes as well, which runs in cloud, in datacenters, and on edge compute. And the paradigm is basic enough that it can be applied even in highly constrained IoT or embedded environments.

In the next few sections, we cover various environments in which serverless applications are run.