When considering the application of architectural patterns, which scenario best utilizes the serverless architecture on IBM Cloud?

Question

Options

• AApplications that require extensive customization of the underlying operating system
• BHigh-traffic web applications that need to scale automatically with demand
• CLegacy applications that are tightly coupled and require significant refactoring
• DData-intensive applications that perform complex transactions

• A
  3% (2)
• B
  79% (46)
• C
  12% (7)
• D
  5% (3)

Explanation

Serverless architecture excels at auto-scaling high-traffic web applications (option B) because it automatically provisions and de-provisions compute resources in response to demand, eliminating idle capacity costs and manual scaling configuration - exactly the pattern IBM Cloud Functions (based on Apache OpenWhisk) is designed for.

Why the distractors fail:

• A is wrong because serverless abstracts away the OS entirely; you have no access to configure it.
• C is wrong because tightly coupled legacy apps resist the event-driven, stateless function model that serverless requires - refactoring them into discrete functions is the opposite of what they need.
• D is wrong because serverless functions are short-lived with strict execution time limits, making them a poor fit for long-running, complex transactional workloads that need persistent connections.

Memory tip: Think of serverless as "pay-per-trigger, scale-to-zero" - if the use case benefits from not running constantly and bursting on demand, serverless wins. If it needs OS control, persistent state, or long transactions, it doesn't.

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