Introduction
Serverless computing offers a number of advantages over traditional cloud-based or server-centric infrastructure. By using a serverless architecture, developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises. This reduced overhead lets developers reclaim time and energy that can be spent on developing great products which scale and that are reliable.Serverless services like AWS Lambda come with automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-value billing model. Lambda is an event-driven compute service that enables you to run code in response to events from over 200 natively-integrated AWS and SaaS sources - all without managing any servers.
What is serverless computing?
Serverless computing is a method of providing backend services on an as-used basis. A serverless provider allows users to write and deploy code without the hassle of worrying about the underlying infrastructure. A company that gets backend services from a serverless vendor is charged based on their computation and does not have to reserve and pay for a fixed amount of bandwidth or number of servers, as the service is auto-scaling. Note that despite the name serverless, physical servers are still used but developers do not need to be aware of them.
Advantages of serverless computing
Cost Benefits:- Serverless computing allows developers to purchase backend services on a flexible ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis, meaning that developers only have to pay for the services they use. This is like switching from a cell phone data plan with a monthly fixed limit, to one that only charges for each byte of data that actually gets used.
No server management is necessary:- Although 'serverless' computing does actually take place on servers, developers never have to deal with the servers. They are managed by the vendor. This can reduce the investment necessary in DevOps, which lowers expenses, and it also frees up developers to create and expand their applications without being constrained by server capacity.
“Greener” hosting and computing:- Companies that host data centers or their own servers need to run their servers at all times. Think about all the huge data centers and the physical resources needed to build these centers. Think about the energy needed to keep them running. The good thing about serverless architecture is that you can buy servers on demand when you need it. This can reduce the resources needed to keep various companies online.
Quick deployments and updates are possible:- Using a serverless infrastructure, there is no need to upload code to servers or do any backend configuration in order to release a working version of an application. Developers can very quickly upload bits of code and release a new product. They can upload code all at once or one function at a time, since the application is not a single monolithic stack but rather a collection of functions provisioned by the vendor.
Happier customers:- This will depend on the company in question. Serverless architecture can potentially lead to happier customers. A company that can draw up new servers and ship features faster means that customers can access these new features. Nobody wants to wait an entire year for small fixes. Through serverless, you don’t have to worry about infrastructure. You can release logic and features quickly that will improve the user experience.
AWS Serverless architecture
AWS Lambda:- With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code as a ZIP file or container image, and Lambda automatically and precisely allocates compute execution power and runs your code based on the incoming request or event, for any scale of traffic. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from over 200 AWS services and SaaS applications or call it directly from any web or mobile app. You can write Lambda functions in your favorite language (Node.js, Python, Go, Java, and more) and use both serverless and container tools, such as AWS SAM or Docker CLI, to build, test, and deploy your functions.
Amazon API Gateway:- Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications.
API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out and, with the API Gateway tiered pricing model, you can reduce your cost as your API usage scales.
Amazon S3:- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.
Amazon RDS:- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types - optimized for memory, performance or I/O - and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. You can use the AWS Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.
Disadvantages of serverless computing?
Testing and debugging become more challenging:- It is difficult to replicate the serverless environment in order to see how code will actually perform once deployed. Debugging is more complicated because developers do not have visibility into backend processes, and because the application is broken up into separate, smaller functions.
Serverless computing introduces new security concerns:- When vendors run the entire backend, it may not be possible to fully vet their security, which can especially be a problem for applications that handle personal or sensitive data. Because companies are not assigned their own discrete physical servers, serverless providers will often be running code from several of their customers on a single server at any given time. This issue of sharing machinery with other parties is known as 'multitenancy' – think of several companies trying to lease and work in a single office at the same time. Multitenancy can affect application performance and, if the multi-tenant servers are not configured properly, could result in data exposure.
Serverless architectures are not built for long-running processes:- This limits the kinds of applications that can cost-effectively run in a serverless architecture. Because serverless providers charge for the amount of time code is running, it may cost more to run an application with long-running processes in a serverless infrastructure compared to a traditional one.
Performance may be affected:- Because it's not constantly running, serverless code may need to 'boot up' when it is used. This startup time may degrade performance. However, if a piece of code is used regularly, the serverless provider will keep it ready to be activated – a request for this ready-to-go code is called a 'warm start.' A request for code that hasn't been used in a while is called a 'cold start.'
Conclusion
Serverless, despite the confusing name, is a style of architecture where we rely on running our own server-side systems as part of our applications to a smaller extent than usual.The term ‘serverless’ is somewhat misleading, as there are still servers providing these backend services, but all of the server space and infrastructure concerns are handled by the vendor. Serverless means that the developers can do their work without having to worry about servers at all.
Serverless computing continues to evolve as serverless providers come up with solutions to overcome some of its drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is cold starts.
Typically when a particular serverless function has not been called in a while, the provider shuts down the function to save energy and avoid over-provisioning. The next time a user runs an application that calls that function, the serverless provider will have to spin it up fresh and start hosting that function again. This startup time adds significant latency, which is known as a ‘cold start’.
Once the function is up and running it will be served much more rapidly on subsequent requests (warm starts), but if the function is not requested again for a while, the function will once again go dormant. This means the next user to request that function will experience a cold start. Up until fairly recently, cold starts were considered a necessary trade-off of using serverless functions.
As more and more of the drawbacks of using serverless get addressed and the popularity of edge computing grows, we can expect to see serverless architecture becoming more widespread.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Serverless community, especially those whose content I link to in this article.
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