A Beginner’s Guide: Understanding Serverless in 7mins in 2024

What is Serverless?

Serverless is a cloud-native development model that is also termed as FaaS (Function as a Service) . Serverless computing permits developers to operate the code and there is no need to handle traditional server infrastructure. In other words developers have to run the application and functions without having to spin up and operate a server. There are some famous serverless platforms that consist of Google Cloud Functions in Google Cloud Platform, IBM cloud function in IBM cloud, AWS Lambda in Amazon Web Services.

Serverless Adoption

As per the latest report by Datadog 2023, named’ State of Serverless 2023‘, an annual analysis tracking the adoption of serverless technologies in cloud workloads. The major cloud providers are witnessing substantial growth in serverless usage, especially for container-based solutions.

According to Datadog, a majority of organizations running workloads on AWS or Google Cloud now have at least one Serverless deployment in place, with MS-Azure following closely at 49 percent. Similarly, the latest CNCF Annual Survey reported growth of serverless architecture/FaaS to 53% of respondents.

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To understand the concept of serverless, let’s first clarify the term “Server.”

Server: A computer designed to work all day (24 hours) to provide services to other people on the networks. If you are using the internet, then you are communicating with so many servers, such as web servers that work to send your web pages, mail servers that work to send emails for communication purposes, file servers that work to send your files, etc. So, the server is designed to work quickly and have excess data with high-capacity internet speed.

However, servers are not flexible, which means if you manage your website with your own server, handling daily traffic becomes difficult for the server to manage on time, and this is known as over-provisioning. With servers, you can focus less on developing your website. To solve this type of problem, cloud-based Serverless Products were formulated.

In simple language, Serverless product means “NO server, no worries.” You can only concentrate on your application. By using serverless, you can capture numerous files without have to worry about hard drives or thinking of where to store these files or data. Many companies already had used Serverless in production and these companies are AOL, Netflix & Reuters etc. Serverless is best for applications with variable workloads, where resorces are only required occasionally or in response to some specific event.

Types of Serverless 

Basically there are two types of Serverless, one is FaaS (Function As A Service) and the second one is BaaS (Backend As A Service).

Function as a Service (FaaS): In this type of serverless model, developers have to write some individuals functions that bring out specific tasks. Some famous FaaS platform that consists Google Cloud Functions, AWS Lambda, IBM Cloud functions and Azure functions.

Backend as a Service (BaaS): This serverless model provides backend services for web application, mobile and these backend services are pre-built. It also consists some characteristics like storage, push notifications, authentications & databases. Some of the example of BaaS provides that includes Backendless, Firebase & AWSAmplify.

Pros & Cons Of Serverless

 Advantages of Serverless

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Here are some reasons why you can use Serverless or the benefits, as follows:

1. Money Saving: Serverless follows the model of pay-as-you-use, meaning while performing on the application, you only have to pay for the resources you are using. With serverless, it is not necessary to invest or to manage virtual machines or physical servers and this will helps to remove infrastructure costs, also decreases the initial capital expenditure that will help to save money.
2. Scalability: In terms of incoming requests, this platform automatically scales your application. When there is an increase in the number of users, the cloud provider immediately distributes a lot of resources to operate the workload. Some serverless platforms like Azure functions, Google Cloud functions & AWS Lambda automatically handle the scaling of your application.
3. Faster Work: It permits the developer to update the application much quicker. Here, the developer only has to concentrate on writing the code and creating new characteristics that will help lead to faster work coming to the market for more products and services. The platform of serverless automatically regulate the scaling of resources that depends on the latest workload. Without the help of any manual intervention the auto scaling of serverless assure that your application can handle increasing demand that provides the faster response time.
4. Decreases Administration Responsibility: Many tasks like security patches, software updates become the duty of the cloud provider, freeing developers from administrative tasks.
5. Decreases Operational Aloft: There is no need for the developer to worry about scaling, monitoring, server provisioning, and configuration because the cloud provider handles the underlying infrastructure. This decreases the operational tasks time, allowing the developer to concentrate on creating and deploying applications faster.

Cons Of Serverless

Limited Resources: The platform of serverless exploit the limitation of resources on functions as like memory, execution time and CPU. This can not be allowed for those application which have the high demand on resources and the tasks is running for the long time.

Vendor Lock-In: When you are accepting a serverless platform it means you are locking your application into a specific ecosystem of cloud provider’s. This will becomes very challenging to migrate from one provider to another or if there is any requirement for deploy on-premises because it become the dependency on single provider and that’s why it become the challenges to shift from one provider to another.

Cold Start: As the name suggest cold means the things which is not used for a while, so the functions of serverless can have a cold start time, that means the time that initialize the functions when it hasn’t used for a while. so, when the application is invoked for the first time then the infrastructure of serverless take some time for setting up the resources and this can introduce latency.

Examples Of Serverless 

1. Mobile Backends: Serverless is used for mobile backend data and operates user notifications, file storage, and database interactions, providing a cost-efficient solution.
2. IoT (Internet Of Things): It can be used for Internet of Things applications, such as processing sensor data, sending notifications, and controlling devices.
3. File Processing: Serverless facilitates data storage in cloud storage, file uploads, and image processing.
4. Chatbots: It plays a role in customer interaction platforms like chatbots, combining functions with Natural Language Processing (NLP) services and backend systems communication.
5. Web Applications: It helps in developing web applications and also operates server-side logic & API endpoints.
6. Machine Learning: Serverless is used for machine learning applications requiring cost-efficient and scalable capabilities.