What is FaaS and why it’s changing the way of storing the functions?
We can understand this if we go back in time 10 years ago. At this point, to offer a web functionality you had to have a server which could run the needed, the idea looks reasonable in principle, nevertheless, it has a lot of limitations which makes the developer rejects this idea in many cases.
Using the most powerful weapon to beat the weakest enemy.
It’s necessary to build a complex infrastructure to be able to offer the service, which becomes a tedious task if you pretend to execute small fragments of code. Having to mount and configure a server to do this is like buying an expensive katana to put marmalade on bread.
The resources are completely underused.
Imagine that your function updates a DB when an event is triggered. Doing this work doesn’t require a major effort. However, your function will be able to be triggered only if your server is listening for events all the time, where almost all the time it will be waiting. Just imagine the possibilities of using the wasted resources.
Scaling the problem, a nightmare.
Now imagine your function become more complex, like rendering. A common server may not have the characteristics to accomplish this task, and would be needed to acquire more resources in order to satisfy the requirements. Furthermore, you must to build an architecture which allows the work distribution. As IT manager, thinking about doing this several times in a year, might give you a stomach pain.
There are various kinds of models which overcome this problems, but the FaaS model is undoubtedly the most interesting model. This model delegates the responsibility of executing the code when is needed, and only generating billing when the function is alive. Avoiding the needing of acquiring, setting up and maintaining a whole infrastructure to execute the code. Nowadays, there are different providers for FaaS, however, we’ll focus on 2 providers: Amazon Web Services Lambda and Poetri. Here you can find some characteristics of these service providers.
- Supports various programming languages. Such as Java, Node.js, C# and Python.
- The amount of money collected by the cost of usage scales in intervals of 100ms.
- It has an error recovery system.
- It can be used with other AWS products.
Poetri is a colombian startup which appeared on 2018 with the objective of creating a community for developers while offering FaaS service.
- It supports almost all the programming languages which are being used today, it allows running functions in Java, Node.js, C#, Python, Ruby and Go.
- It’s free! Poetri wants to have more developers using its service to build a great community, for this reason, Poetri is free now.
- Poetri has highly qualified engineers to solve the problems of the users.
- You can use a widely range of functions, which can be found on marketplace. The marketplace allows developers to upload their functions and monetize these by allowing other developers use their functions.
