Serverless Glossary

Browse 10 serverless terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

10 Serverless Terms

Cloudflare Workers
A serverless execution environment that runs JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly at Cloudflare's global network edge, within milliseconds of end users....
Cold Start
The latency penalty when a serverless function or container must be initialized from scratch — loading the runtime, dependencies, and application code before...
Edge Function
A serverless function that runs at CDN edge locations close to the user, rather than in a centralized cloud region. Executes in lightweight runtimes (V8...
Knative
A Kubernetes-based platform for building and operating serverless and event-driven workloads.
Lambda
An anonymous, inline function defined without a name, originating from lambda calculus. Also refers to AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service.
Lambda Function
In cloud computing, a serverless compute unit (named after AWS Lambda) that runs code in response to events — such as HTTP requests, queue messages, or file...
Neon
A serverless PostgreSQL platform that separates storage and compute, enabling features impossible with traditional PostgreSQL deployments. Neon's architecture...
PlanetScale
A serverless MySQL-compatible database platform built on Vitess, the same technology that scales YouTube's database infrastructure. PlanetScale introduced...
Val Town
A social website for writing and deploying small programs (called 'vals') that run on the server. Each val is a TypeScript function that gets its own URL...
Vercel
A cloud platform for frontend developers that specializes in deploying web applications with zero configuration. Founded by Guillermo Rauch and originally...

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