What Is Serverless Architecture and It’s Working?

Serverless architecture is successfully gaining attention in the market. Technical professionals and companies are switching to serverless computing. They are availing many benefits from this concept.?

What is Serverless Architecture?

Serverless architecture is a cloud computing concept in software development. It enables developers to build and run services without underlying infrastructure management. This concept also refers as a cloud computing execution model. It means the cloud provider will manage the allocation and provisioning of the server.

The serverless application runs in the stateless compute containers that cloud providers manage. The cost depends on the number of executions instead of pre-purchased compute capacity.?

The public cloud serverless computing service providers are Azure Function, Amazon’s AWS Lambda, IBM’s OpenWhisk and Google Function. They allow developers to put their codes, create back end applications and develop various event handling routines. Professionals do not have to worry about the fundamental compute resources.?

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What are popular Serverless Architecture Examples?

The well-known examples of serverless architecture are as follows:

• Microsoft Azure Functions
• IBM OpenWhisk
• Google Cloud Functions
• AWS Lambda

Amazon introduced Aws Lambda serverless architecture in the year 2014 which was the first mainstream FaaS platform. On the other hand, Azure serverless computing Functions and Google Cloud Functions (GCF) are the FaaS of Google and Microsoft.

How does Serverless Architecture Work?

Servers allow users to interact with the application and access its functionality. However, there is a time need for resources to manage the server. The team needs to focus on its hardware, software and updates.?

With serverless computing, these responsibilities are passed on to the third-party provider. Thus, they have enough time to focus on writing application code.?

Function as a Service (FaaS) is one of the most popular serverless architectures. When the event triggers the function, it will perform a specific task. It includes incoming emails or an HTTP request. The cloud provider either executes the function on the running server or it will spin up a new server. Moreover, it happens when there is no server currently running.

Fundamental factors of serverless architecture:

• Innovation: It is for single function execution
• Duration: the time it takes to execute the serverless function
• Cold start: It is a latency that happens when a function is triggered for the first time or after a period of inactivity.
• Concurrency Limit: It is number of function instances that can run simultaneously in one region. If the function exceeds this limit, it will be throttled.
• Timeout: It is the amount of time the cloud provider enable function will run before terminating.

Serverless Architecture use cases:

Building RESTful APIs:

To develop RESTful APIs, you can leverage the Amazon API gateway with serverless functions. It will scale with demand.?

Trigger-based task:

The user activity that triggers the event or a series of events is good for serverless architecture.?

Security checks:

The function can be invoked to scan the instance for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities when you spin up a new container.

Asynchronous processing:

Without interrupting the flow of an application, the serverless functions can handle behind the scenes app tasks.

What are Serverless Architecture Benefits?

From a business viewpoint:

• The cost is measured in milliseconds instead of hours.?
• There is faster delivery of features to the market due to smaller deployable units.
• Hiring backend infrastructure engineers is low
• The operational cost is also reduced

From user viewpoint:

• User can provide their own storage back-end i.e. Google Drive, Dropbox
• These kinds of applications offer client-side caching that enhances the offline experience
• Customers receive new features quickly when the business uses the competitive edge to ship features faster.

What are Serverless Architecture Drawbacks?

From a business view:

• Reducing the overall control
• Security risk
• Disaster recovery risk
• There is a need for vendor lock-in to offer more trust for the third party provider

From a developer view:

• Architectural complexity
• It is tricky to test it locally
• There are significant restrictions on the local state
• Lacking operational tools

From user view:

• The increased request latency can give a poor user experience.?

What tools Support Serverless Architecture?

Adopting the right tool is essential for good app performance.?The Serverless Framework or Amazon’s Serverless Application Model (SAM) is the serverless deployment framework. It interacts with the cloud provider’s platform via an API.

You can define the functions, permissions and triggers.?The other providers like AWS also offer serverless testing tools to test the serverless applications locally before deployment. The serverless security tools scan the vulnerabilities functions.

You need to analyse the health and performance after building the serverless application. The serverless functions travel through a complex web of micro-services. It is critical to have real-time visibility on the performance of each function.?

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Serverless Architecture vs Microservices which one to choose?

Most of you might be in a perplexing situation to justify the right platform in micro-services vs serverless architecture.

Well, it all depends on your requirements. If the cost and quick deployment to market are the main priorities, then it is good to choose serverless. However, micro-services are a good choice when there is a chance of changes in the product. It is possible to combine these two concepts in a single cloud-native instance.?

Last Word:

No doubt, serverless architecture is booming the market. It is dominating the next generation of a web application, mobile app back end, real-time processes and many more. As time goes on, it will take over as the next platform.