Ready to minimize undifferentiated work and accelerate the delivery of new features and apps while reducing costs?
Wondering if Serverless Computing really means computing without a server?! Of course, not 😊 Servers still run the code, but the tasks associated with infrastructure provisioning and management become invisible to developers. “Serverless” means they don’t need to be concerned about capacity planning, configuration, patching, maintenance, fault tolerance or scaling. And this is huge, right? It’s the cloud provider that automatically allocates the machine resources required at each moment. Another great news is that you only pay for what you actually consume.
Principles and benefits
By outsourcing the code execution to a cloud provider, this approach helps teams to increase their productivity and lets them concentrate on innovation – delivering more value with higher speed and fewer costs. The benefits, that also represent the core Serverless Computing principles, are clear:
No servers’ management
Using fully managed services enables developers to focus on business logic and eliminate administrative overhead so they can release quickly, get feedback, and iterate to get to market faster. They simply deploy the code, and it runs with high availability.
Boosted agility
Serverless applications reduce the operations dependencies on each development cycle, increasing development teams’ agility to deliver more functionality in less time and flexibility by letting them write code however they choose – in any language or framework.
Less complexity
Built-in service integrations allow developers to use their precious time to build applications instead of configuring them. They can create better applications, easier.
Continuous scalability
With technologies that automatically scale from zero to peak demands, companies can adapt to customer needs faster than ever. The infrastructure dynamically scales up and down within seconds to match the demands of any workload. For certain workloads, such as ones that require parallel processing, serverless can be both faster and more cost-effective than other forms of computing.
Pay-for-value
Unlike traditional methods, in which the user pays a fixed price whether or not uses a given service, in Serverless Computing the charge is only made when a task is executed. Resources utilization is automatically optimized, and you never pay for over-provisioning.
Mitigation of threats and fault-tolerance
By removing management from within the organization, you are also decreasing possible security gaps to which a system is exposed in its day-to-day life. Cloud providers rely on specialized security teams and built-in security that ensure greater and better control over upgrades, monitoring, and contingency plans. Also, redundancy is intrinsic to ensure fault-tolerance and high availability.
Function as a service (FaaS)
FaaS is the basis of a serverless architecture. With FaaS, the physical hardware, virtual machine operating system, and web server software management are all handled automatically by the cloud service provider. This allows you to focus solely on individual functions in your application code. There are several best practices you can follow to make using FaaS easier to deploy and more effective:
- Make each function perform only one action: FaaS functions should be designed to do a single piece of work in response to an event. Make your code scope limited, efficient, and lightweight so functions load and execute quickly.
- Don’t make functions call other functions: The value of FaaS is in the isolation of functions. Too many functions will increase your costs and remove the value of the isolation of your functions.
- Use as few libraries in your functions as possible: Using too many libraries can slow functions down and make them harder to scale.
Time for some action
Ready to minimize undifferentiated work and accelerate the delivery of new features and apps while reducing costs?
There are four large and reliable companies providing serverless computing that are worth exploring: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.
Don’t know how/where to start or need some advice to go further? At InnoTech we have a team of cloud computing experts that can help you on this journey. Count on us to leverage the power of Serverless Computing and enrich your projects in this area.
