Besides doing an excellent job emulating traditional server behavior, cloud providers can also enable entirely new ways to administrate applications and data. Perhaps the most obvious example is serverless computing.
Now don’t be fooled by the name. You can’t run a compute function without a computer environment (a “server”) somewhere that’ll host it. What “serverless” does allow is for individual developers to run their code for seconds or minutes at a time on some else’s cloud servers.
The serverless model—as provided by services like AWS Lambda—makes it possible to design code that reacts to external events. When, for instance, a video file is uploaded to a repository (like an AWS S3 bucket or even an on-premises FTP site), it can trigger a Lambda function that will convert the file to a new video format. There’s no need to maintain and pay for an actual instance running 24/7, just for the moments your code is actually running. And there’s no administration overhead to worry about.
