Serverless is not a promise for tomorrow. It's already a reality for thousands of web projects in production. Faster to deploy, cheaper to run, easier to upgrade: this model redefines the standards of modern development. No more servers to maintain, infrastructures to scale, nights to monitor load increases.
Today, solutions such as AWS Lambda, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers enable you to build scalable, high-performance applications that are ready for instant delivery. And if this approach appeals to startups and major platforms alike, it's because it ticks three strategic boxes: agility, sobriety and efficiency.
But serverless isn't just about “no more servers”. It's a new paradigm. In this article, we take a look at what it means in practice - and why it's becoming the norm.
Serverless is not a promise for tomorrow. It's already a reality for thousands of web projects in production. Faster to deploy, cheaper to run, easier to upgrade: this model redefines the standards of modern development. No more servers to maintain, infrastructures to scale, nights to monitor load increases.
Today, solutions such as AWS Lambda, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers enable you to build scalable, high-performance applications that are ready for instant delivery. And if this approach appeals to startups and major platforms alike, it's because it ticks three strategic boxes: agility, sobriety and efficiency.
But serverless isn't just about “no more servers”. It's a new paradigm. In this article, we take a look at what it means in practice - and why it's becoming the norm.
The serverless model eliminates a historical constraint: infrastructure management. No need to configure, monitor or maintain servers. Developers focus solely on business code, while the cloud provider takes care of the rest: scalability, security, availability.
On the budget side, the pay-as-you-go model makes all the difference. You only pay for what you actually run, down to the millisecond. The result: controlled costs, especially for projects with irregular usage or occasional load peaks.
Last but not least, rapid deployment is a major advantage. An MVP can be put online in a few hours, a microservice in a few minutes. It's a real time-to-market lever.
Serverless is based on an event-driven logic: code only runs when an event forces it to do so. This is the opposite of the monolithic model, which relies on an always-on infrastructure.
This approach is a natural fit with the cloud-native movement, complementing microservices architectures, DevOps and JAMstack. It also combines perfectly with edge computing, bringing processing closer to the end-user for greater speed.
In short, serverless doesn't just follow the trend: it structures it.
Serverless works in a radically different way to traditional architectures. Here, code is not permanently hosted on a server ready to respond: it is triggered only when an event requires it.
This approach is structured around two main models:
Serverless is the ideal solution for all scenarios with one-off triggers or high load variability:
What they all have in common is on-demand execution. The result: maximum efficiency, zero unused resources.
One of the major advantages of serverless is its ability to adapt instantly to load.
There's no need to anticipate traffic peaks or manually resize infrastructure: code runs only when it's needed, with resources automatically allocated by the cloud provider.
No more idle machines. The serverless billing model is based solely on actual usage: each function execution is counted by the millisecond, and billed at the right price.
By delegating the management of servers, security and updates to the cloud provider, teams can focus on what really matters: the product.
Serverless thus frees up time, energy and budget at every stage of a web project's lifecycle.
Switching to serverless offers many advantages, but also brings its share of challenges that need to be anticipated to avoid unpleasant surprises.
To take full advantage of serverless without suffering its limitations, certain precautions are essential from the very first lines of code.
Anticipating these elements right from the design phase guarantees a smoother, more cost-effective project that can evolve over time.
As HubSpot experts, we're constantly testing the technologies that are transforming web development. Serverless is clearly one of them.
We explore solutions such as Netlify, Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda to understand their concrete benefits, both in terms of performance and flexibility.
The aim is to assess their relevance to our customers' business contexts, technical stacks and constraints.
Serverless is not a trend for technophiles. It's a time-to-market gas pedal, and a clear response to the challenges of agility, budget and scalability.
We don't impose it; we activate it where it generates real value: managing a traffic peak, one-off automation, micro-functionality to be deployed rapidly, etc.
The approach is the same as for all our projects: choose the architecture that best serves your objectives.
If serverless is so appealing for its technical advantages, it also deserves to be considered in terms of its ecological footprint. In a world where digital computing already accounts for almost 10% of global electricity consumption, a figure that could double by 2025, every technical decision carries weight.
This is where serverless comes into its own.
Unlike a conventional infrastructure, which runs servers 24 hours a day, even when they're not needed, serverless works on demand. This means:
And that changes everything. This model of granular consumption, paying only for what runs, is directly in line with a logic of digital sobriety.
The Observatoire des Médias sur l'Écologie, via its Quota Climat project, is a case in point. Built on Scaleway's serverless architecture, the project combined on-demand containers and Serverless Jobs to dynamically adapt resource usage to real needs.
The result:
Beyond the technical logic, this choice has enabled us to reduce costs, accelerate development, and respect a true eco-design approach. Infrastructure is no longer a silent energy debt. It becomes a lever for optimization.
Let's be clear: no cloud architecture is “green” by nature. Even when powered by renewable energies, data centers are still greedy for resources and cooling. But aiming for sustainability means choosing an infrastructure that's better adapted, more economical, and more aligned with actual usage.
This is exactly what serverless enables. It imposes a discipline through design: code more soberly, think about peaks, avoid excesses.
And in an age when every web request has an environmental cost, this approach makes a real difference.
Serverless is gaining ground because it meets the real challenges: delivering faster, adapting without friction, reducing infrastructure costs. It's not a developer's gimmick; it's a modern production framework that aligns technical performance with marketing efficiency.
For today's and tomorrow's web projects, it offers native scalability, unprecedented flexibility and product-oriented logic.
This is the promise that ambitious teams are looking for. And it's in this direction that if/else agency continues to explore, support and grow your projects.
Crédit : Photo de Growtika sur Unsplash