Understanding Serverless
Learn what to watch for a speedy Serverless function
So Serverless lets you fast ship your code. But what exactly is happening with that code? In this post, I will delve deeper into how your code is executed in the Serverless context. For practicality, this will be done with a cloud platform as background. For Serverless technology, the benefits are mostly gained anyway on Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
The first step in execution is a trigger that kicks off a series of events. This trigger could be an HTTP request, a file upload (S3 or Azure Blob), or any other event supported by your cloud platform.
The next step is that the platform assigns resources, initializes a runtime, and initializes your code to be invoked. When all this is done your code is invoked. When no triggers for your code are received for some time, the resources will shut down.
This simple timeline tells us the important characteristics of running Serverless code. The time to init the runtime and your Serverless function is also called the ‘Cold start’, because once it is initialized your function will be running some time after the…
