In recent years, a new service model named Function as a Service (FaaS) has been developed, which is also known as serverless computing.

Serverless computing is a cloud computing paradigm that allows the execution of applications without worrying about problems related to the underlying infrastructure. The term serverless could be misleading; in fact, it could be thought that this model does not foresee the use of processing servers. In reality, it indicates that the provisioning, scalability, and management of the servers on which the applications are executed are administered automatically and in a completely transparent manner for the developer. Everything is possible thanks to a new architecture model called serverless.

The first FaaS model dates back to Amazon, when the AWS Lambda service was released in 2014. Over time, other alternatives were added to the Amazon solution, which were developed by other major vendors such as Microsoft, with its Azure Functions, and by IBM and Google, with their own Cloud Functions. There are also valid open source solutions: among the most commonly used, we have Apache OpenWhisk, which is used by IBM on Bluemix for its serverless offering, but also OpenLambda and IronFunctions, with the latter being based on Docker's container technology.

In this recipe, we see how to implement a serverless Python function via AWS Lambda.