Going Serverless
‘Minimalists rejoice’
What does this thought provoking phrase means in this context?
In the developer fraternity, the saying “Less code, less bugs” is really famous. On the similar lines, one can say “Minimal Infrastructure, Minimal operational efforts”.
The ‘Why’ Factor
What makes us think that there is even a need to get rid of servers?
Product Startups can definitely tell you the pain behind, provisioning the infrastructure, managing it, monitoring it and what not. The operational efforts and the OP-EX sometimes gets really expensive for product companies resulting in a constant need of someone who can look after the infrastructure.
What’s in the name?
It’s pretty obvious ‘serverless’ means no servers. But if there are no servers, how can one host their API based applications? Aren’t servers the spine of your infrastructure? The answer is, not necessarily.
Serverless, The alternative
How exactly, does this serverless technology work? does this mean there is no compute? No, serverless facilitates you with a way to de-couple your code in chunks and host it as independent entities known as functions (AWS’s lambda functions, Google’s cloud functions)and you are only charged for the number of times your code gets invoked.
Serverless adopts the micro-services architecture where each function acts as if an independent service doing a certain amount of task.
How does this ensure less operational effort and lesser OP-EX?
Monitoring and Maintenance
Majority of the cloud providers like AWS, Google cloud and Azure provide a way to have your code run the serverless way. This implies that the liability of having to scale your application by provisioning more infrastructure is taken care by the cloud services provider.
Cost
Since you are only charged for the number of times the code has been invoked, your fixed cost which you pay for the servers even if there is no or less traffic, is straight away reduced.
Indeed, resuls in lesser efforts and costs.