All you need to know about Serverless Architecture
Before discussing the benefits and impact of serverless architecture on developers and operations team, we must know what exactly serverless mean. It’s still a new concept and is unclear to many people. With the introduction of AWS Lambda in 2014, it started gaining momentum and growing exponentially since then.
What is serverless?
Serverless is a cloud systems architecture that depends on third-party services also know as (BaaS) — Backend as a service or they run on temporary container also known as (FaaS) — Function as a Service. They don’t involve any servers, virtual machines, or containers to provision or manage. They still exist behind the running application but developer or operators of the application doesn’t realize their presence. You need not go with the literal meaning of the term serverless. It simply means that you need not have virtual machines or servers to run your back-end code.
Using serverless developers need not worry about the servers as they will give their respective function to the service provider who will run their function on demand or on an event basis. In this way, the developers have no need to handle load balancing as the requests/functions will be served on-demand basis. In the case of parallel requests, there will be a function running for each particular application. This way serverless computing makes scalability of the server to infinity.
The consumer of the cloud is charged according to the execution time of the function, per millisecond. If the client is up, and the functions are in use, the consumer will be charged; if there are no clients, and the functions are not in use, there are no events, the consumer will not be charged. It will ultimately help in saving money.
Now let’s understand with some characteristics give by AWS to easily classify which application is serverless and which is not. We will be discussing these 4 characteristics in detail.
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To Wrap Up
The simplicity and cost-saving feature of serverless computing are what makes it famous and worth considering among developers. The vendor looks after all of this, especially the scaling part, without compromising on the performance of the app. The vendor takes care of the scaling part so that the performance of the app doesn’t get compromised.
Apart from AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure, there are some prominent serverless frameworks like Google Cloud Functions, IBM OpenWhisk, and Iron.io that have already made waves in serverless computing. Over the years, you can expect this trend to be at the forefront of the cloud ecosystem.
