Analysts Jeffrey S. Hammond and John R. Rymer explain in this Forrester report how serverless — a set of cloud services, programming patterns, business models, and design ideas — enables new levels of flexibility in software through applications that respond to events.

Applications require someone or something to deploy code on servers, which makes the term serverless as much of a misnomer as “no-ops” (or “cloud”). As developers will tell you, serverless is an approach to development that removes their need to care about servers: provisioning, setting up, configuring, or otherwise interacting with them. Beyond that, the name connotes a new architectural approach and operating principles.

A serverless architecture encompasses multiple development services, the most notable of which are FaaS offerings like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, and the Fx, OpenWhisk, and Riff open source projects.