Serverless Computing

This lesson discusses how serverless computing evolved, what problems it has solved, and what are some drawbacks of it.

⚠️ At the time of this writing (December 2019), the examples in this chapter work only in a GKE cluster. Feel free to monitor the issue 4668 for more info.

We already saw how we could run the serverless flavor of Jenkins X. That helped with many things, like better resource utilization and scalability.

  • Can we do something similar with our applications?
  • Can we scale them to zero when no one is using them?
  • Can we scale them up when the number of concurrent requests increases?
  • Can we make our applications serverless?

Let’s start from the beginning and discuss serverless computing.

What is serverless computing?

To understand serverless computing, we need to understand the challenges we’re facing with more traditional types of deployments of our applications.

Challenges faced in traditional deployments

A long time ago, most of us were ...