Evaluating the Energy Efficiency of Serverless Computing for Small-Scale Web Apps

Abstract—Serverless computing has emerged as a transformative cloud paradigm by abstracting infrastructure management while promising scalability and cost-efficiency. However, its environmental impact, particularly for small-scale web applications, remains underexplored. This paper presents a comparative analysis of energy consumption between serverless computing models, specifically AWS Lambda, and traditional VM-based hosting on AWS EC2 for lightweight web apps. We present experimental data evaluating energy metrics over a 30-day period. Our findings demonstrate that serverless architectures can reduce idle-time energy consumption by up to 65% and overall energy usage by 28% in low-traffic scenarios. This study highlights serverless computing's potential as a green computing solution for sustainable software engineering. Keywords—serverless computing, AWS Lambda, energy efficiency, green computing, cloud sustainability, web applications.