Serverless Architecture and Functions as a Service Questions

Covers architectural and operational aspects of serverless computing and Functions as a Service platforms such as Lambda, Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. Topics include event driven design patterns, stateless versus stateful approaches, state management strategies, serverless friendly data stores, function lifecycle and cold start behavior, concurrency and scaling characteristics, cost and billing models, vendor lock in and portability concerns, integration with messaging and event buses, security and permission models, observability and monitoring for ephemeral compute, and decision criteria for choosing serverless versus traditional compute or container based deployments. Candidates should be able to reason about trade offs, design event driven backends, and propose operational practices to manage reliability and performance in serverless environments.