Bridging the Gap: Why Low‑Code and Serverless Are Better Together

Together, they are one of the most compelling stacks available for application development.

In the world of creating apps and software, change is our norm. To say that application development is constantly changing is cliche at this point. The whole world is constantly looking to do things quicker, more efficiently, and digitally. It's the McDonaldization of software to some degree. Like with fast food, we all would love to order an application on our phones and pick it up on the way home from work (except we all work remotely now).

To meet this demand, vendors have developed two seemingly competing solutions: low-code and serverless computing.

Low-code is all about making app-building accessible to business users. You don't need to write thousands of lines of boilerplate code to create something useful. Instead, you pick and place the pieces you need, and you can build something great in much less time.

Serverless computing attempts to solve technical overhead and therefore speed and cost by solving a different problem. Serverless platforms provide a series of web services that take the place of a server, so the application owner does not have to maintain it. Instead of building an application from the ground up, serverless-oriented engineers cleverly bridge together various web services into their own microservices. They layer custom code on top of this robust platform for application development. For all this, the owner of the application pays according to the usage of the platform.

These may seem like two different strategies, catering to two different audiences. But my professional experience over the past few years has shown me that the two, when leveraged together, form one of the most compelling application development stacks available today. Mark Troester had this idea a few years ago as well and wrote a compelling argument about why they should be leveraged together here.

By looking at these two ideas, we're not just talking about new tools. It's more about thinking differently on how we make apps. It's about making it easier for anyone to bring their ideas to life and not get bogged down by the technical bits. So, let's dive in and see how these two can change the game together.

The rise of Low-Code

The popularity of low-code platforms is soaring, reshaping how we think about building apps. Gartner, a well-known market research firm, has spotted this trend too. They predicted that by 2024, almost 65% of all app development will happen on these user-friendly platforms. I'm hopeful that we get a retrospective on this soon to see where the industry is at today in 2025 relative to this prediction. Certainly the rise of LLMs has eaten up much of the conversation. Nevertheless, low-code applications are used on a daily basis in many organizations.

Low-code platforms make creating apps much easier. They use simple, drag-and-drop interfaces that don't require you to write a lot of complex code. This opens up app development to everyone, not just the people with technical skills. They're called citizen developers, and they're changing the game because now anyone with a good idea can build an app.

This ease of use does more than just lower the barrier to entry; it sparks innovation. When more people can develop their ideas quickly, there’s more room for creativity and new solutions. Organizations can adapt faster and come up with unique answers to problems, which is a huge advantage in today’s fast-moving digital world.

My Journey with Low-Code and Serverless

I have been working professionally as a developer, building custom extensions and applications on the Zoho platform, since 2020. In that time, I've come to realize that most of what Zoho offers is essentially a platform for low-code development. In fact, many other software tools could be looked at as low-code development tools, not only applications that are explcitly labeled as such. If you can customize a layout, present and store data, and build in a custom application layer using scripts, webhooks, drag and drop workflows, or anything like that, you are definitely in the realm of low code.

Around the same time I started working in Zoho, I earned an AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. I did so because I had an interest in cloud computing and I knew that the career prospects were good. At first, I did very little with this, but as I build more and more complex applications using Zoho tools, I saw a gap that could be filled by AWS. The environments for code execution in low-code applications are not very robust. You tend to write code in more of a scripting style that can be very difficult to maintain. You also face various limitations to the execution such as time and number of lines executed. You typically cannot import libraries and are limited to the operations availabe to you in that environment. Therefore, as more complicated needs would arise, I would look to a serverless back end over which I had more control, with integration by HTTP calls to custom APIs of my own design. Since 2022, my platform of choice for this work has been Zoho Catalyst.

Low-Code Meets Serverless

There is great power in the fusion of low-code with serverless. A developer or small team can rapidly build an application on a low-code platform, leveraging a serverless full-code back end when facing limitations of the low-code platform. Low-code makes the application development easy and accessible. You don’t have to be a coding expert to create something useful, and many complete applications can be built on these platforms only. The serverless computing layer will give the application additional horsepower when necessary, and much like most low-code platforms you don’t want to worry about keeping computers running all the time just for your app to work. Serverless computing automatically adjusts resources for your app as usage fluctuates.

Zoho is my Platform of Choice

Now, even though I'm open to chatting about all sorts of platforms, Zoho is my main ingredient. I work with it professionally, so when we talk about making apps, I'll often talk about how it’s done using Zoho's tools. It's like my go-to toolbox. And just so you know, I also have a secondary toolset; I can work with AWS (which is another big, powerful set of tools for building and running apps).

Zoho is really stepping up its game by mixing serverless development with its low-code offerings in Catalyst. Zoho's move means if you have some serious coding chops, you can dive in and do even more complex, powerful things, while still enjoying the simplicity of Zoho's take on the serverless experience.

Please Subscribe for More

As we wrap up, I want to extend an invitation to all of you to continue this conversation on our Substack. Your experiences, insights, and contributions are the keys to evolving our standards and practices in the world of app development. So, don't hold back! Share your journey, tips, and thoughts with me. Together, let's pave the way for an even brighter future in application development.