Ian and I chat about this in Shot 2 of HubShots 200.
HubSpot Serverless functions are a way to write Javascript functions in HubSpot to interact with both HubSpot objects (eg HubDb table or contact object) as well as other systems (eg writing out to an external platform.
Simple example – you can’t write to HubDb from HubL or via a Workflow. Instead you would use serverless functions and write via the HubDb API.