Platform at present, but there are many others, too. Name-a tweet by no longer publicly available.)ĪWS Lambda is one of the most popular implementations of a Functions-as-a-Service One way to think of this is “Functions as a Service” or Serverless can also mean applications where server-side logic is still written by theĪpplication developer, but, unlike traditional architectures, it’s run in stateless computeĬontainers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one invocation), and fully."BaaS" as shorthand in the rest of this article. Services have been previously described as “ (Mobile) Backend as a Mobile apps-that use the vast ecosystem of cloud-accessible databases (e.g., Parse,įirebase), authentication services (e.g., Auth0, AWS Cognito), and so on. These are typically “rich client” applications-think single-page web apps, or Incorporate third-party, cloud-hosted applications and services, to manage server-side logicĪnd state. Serverless was first used to describe applications that significantly or fully.Starters, it encompasses two different but overlapping areas: Like many trends in software, there’s no one clear view of what Serverless is. We’ll get into the benefits and drawbacks To start we'll look at the “what” of Serverless. Worth considering? In this article I hope to enlighten you a little on these questions. But what is Serverless, and why is (or isn’t) it
Software vendors dedicated to the subject.
Invested in Serverless, and we’ve seen plenty of books, open-source projects, conferences, and The “Big Three” cloud vendors-Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-are heavily Serverless computing, or more simply Serverless, is a hot topic in the softwareĪrchitecture world. Trade-offs - take a look at the bliki entry on If you need a concise summary of what serverless is and its This article provides an in-depth look at serverless architecture and as a Serverless architectures may benefit from significantly reduced operationalĬost, complexity, and engineering lead time, at a cost of increased reliance on vendorĭependencies and comparatively immature supporting services. Single-page applications, such architectures remove much of the need for a traditional always-on
By using these ideas, and related ones like On a “Functions as a Service” (FaaS) platform.
Service” (BaaS) services, and/or that include custom code run in managed, ephemeral containers Serverless architectures are application designs that incorporate third-party “Backend as a Abstractions over vendor implementations.Increased transparency and clearer expectations from vendors.API gateway definition, and over-ambitious API gateways.Repetition of logic across client platforms.Time to market and continuous experimentation.Reduced packaging and deployment complexity.Scaling benefits of FaaS beyond infrastructure costs.Optimization is the root of some cost savings.