Serverless isn’t exactly serverless!

The evolution of computing gained momentum when the size of computing machines started reducing from the size of a building to that of a human palm. Virtualization added fuel to the fire and cloud computing has taken it to a higher level altogether. The rise of VMs and Containers is making it bigger and better… bigger in terms of output and better in terms of quality of output. System architectures are also evolving from monolithic to microservices-based and the adoption of DevOps practices with a much more refined CI/CD pipeline is making them more efficient, faster, and simpler.

This increased speed of development and delivery expects infrastructure to be equally agile. Your infrastructure needs to be self-manageable and self-scalable to cope with the demands for computing resources. Serverless is the next phase in this evolution of computing. All the major providers are introducing newer and better services around the serverless architecture and serverless computing to speed up the process of application development and delivery so that you can focus on applications rather than the infrastructure. But, even today I find people that unsure about what serverless exactly is.

So, let’s see what is serverless and I will also try to put some light on aspects such as its application areas and things you should consider before going serverless.

What is serverless computing?

In serverless computing, an organization need not have a dedicated server that is responsible for the allocation of resources and services to machines in a network. The cloud service provider runs a server that manages this task and is responsible for other network management activities. The API gateway acts as a mediator between users’ networks and the cloud provider’s server. It is responsible for the exchange that happens between them.

Function as a Service (FaaS) is a vertical of serverless technology that deals with running code functions rather than the complete application. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and Kubeless are some of the most popular FaaS services. Let’s not get into the details of FaaS here as it can be a separate topic altogether. For now, let’s stick to serverless.

How is it different from traditional computing?

In traditional computing, having a network meant having a server on organizational premises. Organizations preferred servers with higher capabilities than what was actually required by the network for obvious reasons like accommodating more machines when needed and future network upgrades as per organizational requirements. This resulted in …read more