Categories of Serverless Computing

Categorizing serverless

We’ll categorize serverless computing into two big categories:

• Functions as a Service (FaaS)
• Containers as a Service (CaaS)

Those two models are mostly the same since, in both cases, our code, applications, functions, or whatever we want to call them, are likely running in containers.

Note: We use the word “likely” because the information on how vendor-specific FaaS is implemented is not always public. Nevertheless, it’s almost certainly based on containers, and the main question becomes what is orchestrating them. In some cases, it’s Kubernetes, and in others, it’s Docker Swarm. Some solutions use custom platforms, but in other cases we don’t know what’s behind them. Still, all that doesn’t matter. For us, as users, what matters is that our functions are running, and not what is running them.