What is serverless architecture?

Serverless architecture is a cloud execution model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation and provisioning of servers. Despite the name, servers still exist — developers simply don't provision, manage, or scale them. Instead, code is deployed as individual functions that are executed in response to events, and the cloud provider handles the infrastructure. Developers write business logic, define triggers (HTTP request, file upload, database change), and pay only for the compute time their functions actually use (often per-millisecond). Key characteristics: no server management, automatic scaling (from zero to millions of invocations), pay-per-execution billing, and event-driven execution. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions are the leading serverless platforms.