If you have been dozing under a rock for last few years, Serverless Architecture is your next big step. It is required in the journey from physical hosting to deploying software or code on the cloud. Following a logical progression from monoliths to microservices, serverless architecture sees the big future through fine-grained, event-driven functions.
For some might relate serverless with microservices-based applications but, it is a further breakdown of applications. For every action you make, there is a function focused on an even smaller scope of application logic than that of microservices.
Serverless compute is a computational model where no dedicated servers or VMs need to be up and running on your premises 24×7. It is the Cloud provider you choose, that takes care of everything; from VMs to the underlying infrastructure, orchestration, and automation required to support any type of applications and run a voluminous number of events.
The request comes in via an API gateway. This automatically triggers code or function in response to a set of pre-defined events and finds a virtual server for execution. The managed server then executes the function you requested. Then it returns the result via that API and decommissions as soon as the task is successfully accomplished.
AWS Serverless Architecture:
Since the unit of deployment in serverless computing is an autonomous function, you can also call The platform – Function as a Service (FaaS).
And when it comes to harnessing cutting-edge technologies like mobility, IoT, or real-time big data, serverless architecture sure is a huge advantage.
Why Serverless Architecture?
Believe It or Not –
Tapping the power of serverless, enterprises achieve the flexibility to scale as required. Also, you can do this without any fuss of running and managing armada of servers. You pay only for what you use and for the fraction of time taken to run your functions. More importantly, the idle computing time doesn’t incur any cost.
Talking of serverless computing, we cannot miss Amazon Lambda. AWS pulled it out of the hat for running and managing back-end applications in the cloud, back in 2014.
The auto-scaling power, high availability and cost efficiency of Lambda are giving birth to a whole new range of innovative applications. Like putting the scale, ease of development, and deployment in the hands of developers.
Bye-Line | “Serverless” or “serverless computing” doesn’t mean that your code or functions will be running in the air. Neither it means, there are no servers involved. It is simply a paradigm shift from buying and managing dedicated servers on your own to acquiring a third-party platform. The third party runs all your functions on their completely managed servers.
A serverless approach lets developers shift their focus from server and operational levels to the development level.