Serverless Terminology

Serverless Platform

• The platform supports administration, permission and user management associated with the development of Serverless Services.

User Account

• A user account represents a single user in the Serverless Platform.
• A user account stores sensitive identifying information such as email, password, username, etc
• A user account is considered the private representation of a user.

User Profile

• A user profile represents the public presentation of a user in the Serverless Platform.
• A user profile stores information that id displayed publicly about a user such as name, bio, github username, etc

Serverless Service

• A Serverless Service consists of source code, a description, and service configuration.
• A service configuration is defined by a single serverless.yml

Serverless Framework

• Drives the development/deployment lifecycle of a Serverless Service
• Used to install Functions and Plugins
• Makes use of Plugins to extend the functionality of the framework.

Plugin

• A Plugin is where the business logic lives for the functionality of the Serverless Framework.

Registry

• A service for registering and retrieving code packages for use in the Serverless Framework.
• Registry is primarily used by framework for building Serverless Services.

FDK

• Provides a simple middleware abstraction
• Enables runtime interaction with Serverless Services
  • Executing functions
  • Dispatching events

Gateway

• Every Serverless Service automatically has a Gateway provisioned on deployment.
• The Gateway enables execution of the Functions and handles propagation of Events.

Discovery

• A service for registering and retrieving information on how to dispatch requests to Serverless Services.
• Discovery is primarily used by the FDK for retrieving info on how to make calls and emit events to Serverless Services within code.
• A Serverless Service is automatically registered with Discovery when it is registered with the Serverless Platform.

Function

• Functions represent a basic unit of executable code.

Unprovisioned Functions

• A zip file of a Function which you can download from the Registry and provision on your own infrastructure (e.g., AWS account).

Provisioned Functions

• A Function that is provisioned on someone’s infrastructure and able to be invoked by someone else.
• All previous versions are expected to be kept available (which is possible w/ FaaS since all versions can be kept on a provider, awaiting an invocation for no additional cost/maintenance).

Event

• Events are a unit of data that are sent between services