Definition of "serverless"

Generally, when people think of serverless computing, they tend to think of applications with back-ends that run on third-party services, also described as code running on ephemeral containers. In my experience, many businesses and people who are new to serverless computing will consider serverless applications to be simply “in the cloud.”

2017, Maddie Stigler, Beginning Serverless Computing, Apress, page 1

A group at the University of California, Berkeley, proposed a serverless network file system architecture and developed a prototype implementation.

2005, Coulouris et al, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design