Try to imagine that we live in a world fully driven by software with a kind of intelligence.

It would be a world where we could develop software without doing anything. Just say what kind of software we would like to run, and minutes later, it would be there somewhere on the internet serving many users. And we would only pay for the number of requests made by our users. Well, that kind of world is too unreal.

Now, let's be more realistic and think of the world where we still need to develop software by ourselves. At least for now, we do not need to take care of any server provisioning and management. This is actually, at least, the best world for developers, where we can deploy our applications to reach millions of users without taking care of any server, or even not needing to know where these servers are. The only thing we actually want is to create an application that addresses the needs of the business at scale, at an affordable price. The serverless platforms have been created to address these problems.

As a response to developers and fast-growing businesses, serverless platforms seem to be a very huge win. But what exactly are they?