Serverless
In plain terms
Running code without managing the servers it runs on.
Going deeper
With serverless (like AWS Lambda), you deploy functions and the cloud provider runs them on demand, scaling automatically and billing per execution. Servers still exist, but you never provision or maintain them.
Under the hood
Scales to zero and bills per invocation, but suffers cold-start latency and execution-time/memory limits; statelessness and externalized state are required.
Examples
AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Functions, Vercel.
Think of it like...
Like ride-hailing instead of owning a car: a vehicle appears when you need one, you pay only for the trip, and parking and maintenance aren't your problem.