{"head":{"title":"What Is Serverless Computing? Definition | OceanLab","description":"Serverless runs your code on demand without you managing servers, and bills per use. Where it fits, cold starts and costs, an example and common mistakes.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary/serverless"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"},{"name":"serverless","path":"/glossary/serverless"}],"slug":"serverless","term":"Serverless","aka":["serverless computing","functions as a service","FaaS"],"category":"Hosting and delivery","short":"A cloud model where the provider runs your code on demand and manages the servers, and you pay for what you use rather than for idle machines.","body":[["With serverless functions, you deploy code and the platform runs it when a request or event arrives, scales it with load and stops it when idle. Serverless also covers managed databases, queues and storage that scale and bill the same way."],["There are still servers, but you never see or patch them. The trade-offs are run time and memory limits, ",{"href":"/glossary/cold-start","text":"cold starts"}," and less control over the runtime."]],"why":["Serverless removes most server work and makes cost follow usage, which suits new products, spiky traffic and background jobs. At steady high load it can cost more than ",{"href":"/glossary/container","text":"containers"},", so the choice should be checked against expected traffic."],"example":["A recruiting startup's resume parser runs as a serverless function triggered by each upload. Most of the day it costs almost nothing. During a hiring drive it scales to hundreds of parallel runs without anyone changing a setting."],"inBuild":["We often start new products on serverless and managed services to keep ops light, then move steady, heavy workloads to containers when the numbers say so. Database access goes through ",{"href":"/glossary/connection-pooling","text":"connection pooling"},", and functions stay small and stateless."],"mistakes":[["Ignoring per-request costs at high, steady volume."],["Long-running jobs that hit the platform's time limit."],["Opening a database connection per call and exhausting the database."]],"related":[{"href":"/glossary/cold-start","label":"Cold start","detail":"The extra delay when a serverless function or a new server instance has to start up before it can handle a request."},{"href":"/glossary/edge-function","label":"Edge function","detail":"A small piece of server code that runs on a CDN's servers around the world, close to the user, instead of in one central region."},{"href":"/glossary/container","label":"Container (software)","detail":"A package that holds an application and everything it needs to run, isolated from other software on the same machine."},{"href":"/glossary/autoscaling","label":"Autoscaling","detail":"Automatically adding or removing computing capacity, such as servers or containers, as the load on a system goes up or down."},{"href":"/glossary/connection-pooling","label":"Connection pooling","detail":"Keeping a set of open database connections and sharing them across requests, instead of opening a new connection for each one."}],"tools":[],"links":[{"href":"/pricing/categories/serverless","label":"Serverless pricing","detail":"Function and serverless prices, with sources."},{"href":"/pricing","label":"Pricing library","detail":"Software and API prices, each with its source and date."}],"sources":[],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}