Why Use Serverless Computing

“Serverless Computing is a Cloud computing execution model that lets software developers build and run applications and servers without having to provision or manage the back-end infrastructure.”

The global Serverless Computing market is expected to increase by more than 23.17% between 2021 and 2026.

Advancements in computing technology are enabling organizations to incorporate a serverless environment, thereby augmenting the market. The benefits of Serverless Computing such as unconditional development and deployment, built-in scalability among others are playing an important role in supporting the rapid adoption of Serverless Computing thereby fueling the growth of the market.

Serverless Computing offers a number of advantages over traditional cloud-based or server-centric infrastructure. For many developers, Serverless Architectures offer greater scalability, more flexibility, and quicker time to release, all at a reduced cost.

What Is Serverless Computing

Developers spend countless hours solving business problems with code. Then it’s the ops team’s turn to spend countless hours, first figuring out how to get the code that developers write up and running on whatever computers are available, and second making sure those computers operate smoothly. The second part truly is a never-ending task. Why not leave that part to someone else?

A lot of innovation in IT over the past two decades—virtual machines, cloud computing, containers—has been focused on making sure you don’t have to think much about the underlying physical machine that your code runs on. 

Serverless Computing is a Cloud computing execution model that lets software developers build and run applications and servers without having to provision or manage the back-end infrastructure. With serverless, the cloud vendor takes care of all routine infrastructure management and maintenance, including updating the OS, applying patches, managing security, system monitoring and planning capacity.

With Serverless Computing, developers purchase back-end services from Cloud services vendors on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means they pay only for the services used. The main goal of Serverless Computing is to make it simpler for developers to write code designed to run on cloud platforms and to perform a specific role.

Why use a Serverless Architecture

Developers who want to decrease their go-to-market time and build lightweight, flexible applications that can be expanded or updated quickly may benefit greatly from Serverless Computing.

Serverless Architectures will reduce costs for applications that see inconsistent usage, with peak periods alternating with times of little to no traffic. For such applications, purchasing a server or a block of servers that are constantly running and always available, even when unused, may be a waste of resources. A serverless setup will respond instantly when needed and will not incur costs when at rest.

Also, developers who want to push some or all of their application functions close to end users for reduced latency will require at least a partially serverless architecture, since doing so necessitates moving some processes out of the origin server.

There are cases when it makes more sense, both from a cost perspective and from a system architecture perspective, to use dedicated servers that are either self-managed or offered as a service. For instance, large applications with a fairly constant, predictable workload may require a traditional setup, and in such cases the traditional setup is probably less expensive.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Serverless Computing

The advantages of Serverless Computing are:

  • Cost-effectiveness. Users and developers pay only for the time when code runs on a serverless compute platform. They don’t pay for idle virtual machines (VMs).
  • Easy deployment. Developers can deploy apps in hours or days rather than weeks or months.
  • Autoscaling. Cloud providers handle scaling up or spinning down resources or instances when the code isn’t running.
  • Increased developer productivity. Developers can spend most of their time writing and developing apps instead of dealing with servers and runtimes.

The disadvantages of Serverless Computing are:

  • Vendor lock-in. Switching Cloud providers might be difficult because the way serverless services are delivered can vary from one vendor to another.
  • Inefficient for long-running apps. Sometimes using long-running tasks can cost much more than running a workload on a VM or dedicated server.
  • Latency. There’s a delay in the time it takes for a scalable serverless platform to handle a function for the first time, often known as a cold start.
  • Debugging is more difficult. Because a serverless instance creates a new version of itself each time it spins up, it’s hard to amass the data needed to debug and fix a serverless function.

Final Thoughts

Serverless Computing continues to evolve as serverless providers come up with solutions to overcome some of its drawbacks. As more and more of the drawbacks of using Serverless get addressed and the popularity of Edge Computing grows, we can expect to see Serverless Architecture becoming more widespread.

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