You are writing a mobile or HTML5 web application that needs just a little bit of a backend. Maybe you want to access MongoDB, send an SMS, or an e-mail. Do you really need to host your own Node.js service to run this small snippet of backend logic? In this talk I will take a hard look at the role of the backend in modern applications. I will introduce the concept of a webtask – a lightweight representation of backend logic that can safely be embedded in a client application. I will show how you can use modern container technologies based on CoreOS and Docker to build a generic runtime for securely executing web tasks directly from a mobile or HTML5 application. You don’t need a backend to run backend code.