What is Serverless? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Serverless is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation and provisioning of servers. Developers deploy functions (small units of code) that execute in response to events. The "serverless" name is slightly misleading — servers still exist, but developers don't manage them. The key benefits: no server management, automatic scaling, and pay-only-for-execution-time pricing.
Serverless in the UK
Serverless is increasingly popular for UK software development — particularly for event-driven processing, variable-traffic APIs, and scheduled jobs. AWS Lambda in eu-west-2 (London) and Azure Functions in UK South both satisfy UK GDPR data residency requirements. UK considerations: Lambda/Functions maximum execution time (15 minutes) limits use for long-running tasks; cold starts (initial invocation delay, typically 100–500ms for Node.js/Python) must be managed for latency-sensitive applications; Cyber Essentials patch management for serverless functions means keeping the function runtime (Node.js 20, Python 3.12) updated within 14 days of security patches.
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