How businesses are using serverless functions?

Serverless computing is a cloud computing model in which the cloud provider manages the server infrastructure and dynamically allocates the resources required to run the application. This means that developers do not need to worry about provisioning or managing servers, which can save time and money.

Serverless computing is often used for event-driven applications, such as web applications that are triggered by user actions or IoT applications that are triggered by sensor data. It can also be used for batch processing applications, such as data analytics applications that process large amounts of data.

Here are some examples of serverless functions that businesses are adopting:

1. APIs - Building RESTful or GraphQL APIs using serverless functions to expose data and services. This provides agility and scale.
2. ?Event processing - Handling events like form submissions, file uploads, payment notifications using functions that trigger automatically.
3. ?Data transformations - Performing ETL (extract, transform, load) operations on data using serverless functions instead of managed databases.
4. ?Scheduled jobs - Running jobs or tasks on a schedule (e.g. hourly, daily) using serverless functions instead of VMs or containers.
5. ?File processing - Processing files uploaded to cloud storage using serverless functions to extract data, convert formats, etc.
6. ?Notifications - Sending notifications via email, SMS or push using functions that are triggered by events.
7. ?Backend for mobile/web apps - Building app backends using serverless functions as an alternative to VMs and containers. Offers better scalability and longevity.
8. ?Image/video processing - Resizing, converting or moderating images/videos stored in cloud storage using functions.
9. ?Analytics - Performing calculations on data to generate insights using functions that run on a schedule or are triggered by events.
10. ?Web crawling - Conducting web crawls and scraping data from websites using functions to collect information at scale.

So in short, serverless functions are useful for any task that needs to run dynamically in response to events or on a schedule, without the need to maintain complex infrastructure. The scale, simplicity and cost benefits compared to traditional infrastructures make them an appealing choice for many types of backend tasks.