Having a server is like having a car. Its yours, you do what you want with it but: 1) If you don't drive much then you might be overpaying 2) You have to worr

Having a server is like having a car. Its yours, you do what you want with it but: 1) If you don't drive much then you might be overpaying 2) You have to worry about the car infrastructure, you have to maintain it and if it breaks down you might be offline (unable to travel) until its repaired. 3) If you need bring home a washer and dryer for example you have to worry about your car having the needed capacity (scaling) In todays world you can decide not to own a car and just use Uber or whatever vehicle sharing service is available to you. You pay only for the rides you need, you don't have to worry about infrastructure (repairs) and you can always pay for larger vehicles on demand. That's serverless computing. Instead of paying for a physical computer or a virtual computer (compute service) you deploy the app you want to run and pay for each run of your app. Typically the app is some type of request/response or event processing app. The cloud company maintains the compute fleet and when a request comes in the will deploy your app to one of their compute nodes long enough to service the request. Its called serverless not because there are no servers but because you don't know or care about the server it runs on. The hardware could change out between executions. You don't care about failed hardware, OS patching, etc. The lowest level you typically deal with is selecting the app language (node, java, etc).