Serverless Computing: Benefits and Applications

For a long time, web developers’ job responsibilities were to write code to solve the customer’s problems, set up the application’s running environment, manage the servers, and host the process. Most of the developer’s time was spent installing the required operating systems and libraries and resolving dependencies to test and run the web applications. Ultimately, this resulted in decreased productivity for the developer due to divided attention on development and circular maintenance. To deal with this, companies require a solution that relieves developers from purchasing, hosting, and managing the servers, and instead, allows them to focus on code.

Serverless Computing: A New and Easier Approach to Web Development#

Any technology in the world is a response to a specific problem. Similarly, serverless computing came into existence to give a solid response to conventional monolithic web architectures. These are traditional architectures to build web-based applications in which we have to host web and database servers on-premises and employ a team to maintain this architecture. Monolithic architectures have become unusable due to their cost and management overheads.

What Does Serverless Mean?#

After reading or listening to the term “serverless,” the first thing that comes to mind is that there is no server. Absolutely not! Indeed, there is server infrastructure for the deployment and execution of our applications.

Serverless computing is an abstraction of the underlying cloud computing infrastructure. Serverless computing is a cloud computing model in which a cloud provider or a third-party vendor manages the servers for our company. Our company does not require us to purchase, install, host, and manage servers. Instead, our cloud manager provides all these services to us. According to a market survey of serverless computing, it will register a significant CAGR of 23.17%“Serverless Computing Market Size, Trends, Growth, Overview (2021-2026).” n.d. Www.mordorintelligence.com. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/serverless-computing-market. for the forecast period 2019 to 2027.

Serverless computing, also known as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), ensures that the code exposed to the developer consists of simple event-driven functions. As an outcome, developers become more focused on writing code and providing innovative solutions without the headache of creating test environments and preparing and managing servers for web-based applications. 

Benefits of Serverless Computing#

Various companies around the world are porting their applications to serverless computing models. For instance, Netflix uses AWS LambdaAmazon Web Services (AWS) offers a computing platform as a web service known as AWS Lambda. It serves as a computing service that executes code in response to events while automatically managing the necessary servers and resources to ensure the successful execution of the code. to offer their product on a large scale. Similarly, many other companies use serverless computing cloud models due to various advantages, including:

• Cost effectiveness: This is one of the significant advantages of serverless computing. In conventional cloud services, users pay for over-provisioning resources like storage and CPU time, which often remain idle. However, serverless computing is a pay-for-value costing model; users only pay for the time their code utilizes CPU time and provisioned storage space.

• Faster turnaround: We can move faster from idea to market because our team can fully concentrate on coding, testing, and iterating without the overhead of operations and server management. We don’t need to update the underlying infrastructure like operating systems or other software patches. We can concentrate on building the best possible features without caring about infrastructure and resources.

• Quicker scalability and elasticity: We don't need to worry about the autoscaling policies or systems. Our cloud vendor is responsible for automatically scaling up the capabilities and technologies to cater to the customer’s demands from zero to peak. Similarly, serverless functions should be automatically scaled down when fewer concurrent users exist. This elasticity makes the serverless computing models a pay-as-value billing model.

• Productivity: Developers don’t need to handle complex tasks like multithreading, HTTP requests, etc. FaaS pushes the developers to focus on building the application rather than configuring it.

Serverless Computing Key Vendors#

There are various companies in the market that provide serverless computing services. Some of the market leaders in serverless computing are the following:

• Amazon

• Google

• Microsoft

• IBM

• Alibaba

• Oracle Corporation

• Firebase

Serverless Computing Use Cases#

Serverless architectures have different use cases few of which are outlined below:

• Serverless computing for APIs: One of the most common use cases for serverless computing is REST API. The developer writes a serverless API using serverless functions (e.g., Lambda if AWS is the cloud provider) and receives HTTP requests and data stores (e.g., DynamoDBAmazon provides a NoSQL database service called Amazon DynamoDB as part of its web services. DynamoDB offers key-value based data storage, along with various built-in services such as encryption, autoscaling, backup, replication, and more.) to retrieve and store user data. 

• Serverless computing for storage: In a traditional application development environment, creating and managing data stores is one of the complex tasks. The emergence of serverless data stores like Firebase makes it easier for developers to create and manage databases without the headache of taking backups and other database operations. The cloud manager handles the datastore hosting for end users by following the pay-as-you-used billing model.

• Serverless computing for asynchronous systems: Any system with inconsistent user request patterns can benefit from serverless computing technology. WebhooksIn web development, a webhook is a technique used to enhance or modify the behavior of a web page or web application through custom callbacks. These callbacks can be created, modified, and controlled by third-party users and developers who might not have any direct association with the original website or application. can be an excellent example of inconsistent request patterns, usually fired occasionally. Still, when it happens, a serverless function gets triggered to perform this task and send a response to the user without provisioning a server around the clock. Additionally, alerts and chatbot customer support messages invoked asymmetrically can significantly benefit from serverless architectures.

Conclusion and Next Steps#

Adoption of the serverless computing cloud model is on the rise, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups, as they want to deliver innovative products and features in minimum time with less operational cost. The serverless computing model is ideal for companies looking for solutions to unburden their development teams so they can spend more time creating innovative and large-scale solutions with agility. So if we want to cut our business costs and quickly move our application from idea to market, this is the best time to adopt serverless computing. It is here to stay! 

Happy learning!