To FaaS or Not to FaaS?
Discuss the pros and cons of FaaS.
How to decide?
We should ask two significant questions when contemplating whether we should use managed FaaS flavors of serverless computing. Should we use them? And if we should, should it be AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, or something completely different?
So, should we use managed FaaS? We probably should. But that’s not the right question. We can almost certainly find at least one good example. A more important question is whether managed FaaS can be the solution for a significant percentage of our workload. That’s the question that is more difficult to tackle. To answer it, we first need to establish good use cases for deploying and running functions.
Discussing the use cases
By now, most of us are using or are experimenting with microservices. They’re smaller applications that are loosely coupled, independently deployable, organized around business capabilities, and owned by small teams. You probably know what they are, and you likely have at least one in your system. You might have even converted everything into microservices by now.
What matters is that you do develop and deploy microservices. If you don’t, functions will almost certainly not work for you. From a very simplistic point of view, they are smaller microservices. We could even call them nano services.
On the other hand, if you do have good use cases for microservices, you might benefit from functions. You could continue the trend of shrinking your applications into the very focused and small entities we call functions.
Some use cases are natural candidates for functions, some might produce a questionable return of ...