If you had to breakdown serverless and explain it to someone in middle school, how would you describe it?<p>Would you use an analogy to make it more relatable? Would you try to explain it on a surface level or go into the depths of serverless? What concepts would you focus on?
A web server will take requests and serve them.<p>The web server does this by looking at the request and then running a certain set of instructions on how to serve the request.<p>Rather than having to build the web server, serverless is a service where you can just give the serverless provider the instructions and they will run them for you.
To middle school student, I think I would say something like "It's an abstraction layer that Cloud Providers offer so that you can hand them your code, this abstraction layer will spin up/down infrastructure on demand whenever your code is requested/called. Underneath it all there are still servers and infrastructure, it's called serverless because you (the developer) do not have to think about or manage those servers, you just worry about your code."
Its a programmable calculator on steroids.<p>You create "one liner" programs (lambdas) that do mathematical operations like you would with a programmable calculator, including saving to memory and recalling from memory. You can then chain together the various "one liner" programs (composability) to make a complex program that performs the calculation that you need.
Instead of keeping it under your mattress, you can give your cash to a bank
with the guarantee of making withdrawals anytime, anywhere. Serverless
is like a bank for information, not money.