Serverless architecture abstracts servers away from developers by handling each request or message in its own runtime. It has evolved from monolithic runtimes shared by multiple applications to containerization with each service in its own runtime to serverless computing. Serverless scales automatically and is well suited for building APIs, event-driven apps, and stateless short tasks. Popular serverless platforms include AWS Lambda, Google Functions, and Azure Functions, which support languages like Node.js, Java, Python and C#. Challenges include lack of state and execution time limits, while advantages are infinite scalability and reduced operational complexity.