Serverless / edge function

Renting computing by the minute instead of by the month. Small pieces of code sit dormant, wake up when something calls them, do their job and go back to sleep — and you pay only for the seconds they were awake. Nothing of yours is switched on in between. "Edge" only means those seconds happen on a machine near the person waiting, so the answer comes back quicker.

A van hired by the hour, rather than one sitting on the drive costing you road tax all year.

Why it matters: you will never touch this, and you don't need to. It's here because it's where most of the small machinery around your agents ends up living: the bit that catches a webhook (an outside system pinging in to say something happened), the bit that runs at 2 a.m., the small APIs (the socket one piece of software plugs into another) in between. The question worth asking whoever sets your AI up: what happens to my bill if this suddenly runs a thousand times a day instead of ten? Cheap by the run is only cheap while the runs stay few.

Related: Webhook · API