Serverless Architecture (FaaS) and when to use Serverless ?
Serverless Architecture is more than a buzzword. It’s the most-talked-about topic in the soaftware industry in the past few years. Everyone is trying their hands on Serverless environment. You also might have questions in your mind like – What exactly is Serverless? And when to use Serverless?
Serverless Architecture is a software design model where applications are hosted by a third-party service like Cloud Providers. Serverless does not mean there aren’t servers at all. All Serverless applications run on a server. The only thing to remember here is that Servers are managed by the vendors and not the developers. Hence, it is called Serverless Architecture.
Components of Serverless Architecture
The main components of Serverless Architecture are Serverless Functions & Serverless Backends.
Serverless Functions: serverless functions aka FaaS(Function as a Service) is the main platform for running the serverless logic code. The developers write independent code snippets which are called `functions` and then add these functions to the FaaS platform.This code is then triggered by an event or run on a schedule.Common examples of FaaS are AWS Lambda or Azure functions.
Serverless Backends: serverless backend aks BaaS (Backend as a Service) is a cloud computing offering that abstracts the backend logic, which is then executed on faraway servers.This helps the developers to focus on thier front-end code snippet and integrate with back-end logic that someone else has implemented. Common examples of BaaS are authentication service, storage services, geolocation services etc.
You can also read our post about “Some popular Serverless solutions in 2020” to know more about popular serverless solutions and tools in the market.
How Serverless or FaaS is different from PaaS?
Serverless or Faas (Function as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) both are pretty similar but majorly different at the same time. People often get confused between these two terms. We will give you some points to help you better understand the difference between FaaS and PaaS.
✔ A Serverless app or FaaS does have a physical or virtual server that requires it to be managed. There is also a need to manage the operating system and other web server hosting process requests for your application to run.
✔ Serverless Architecture focuses on the individual functions in your application code. It reduces physical hardware concerns.
✔ On the other hand, PaaS offers the same benefits as Serverless or FaaS. But, PaaS eliminates the need for server hardware as well as software management.
✔ The primary difference is how the application is composed and deployed in both services.
✔ PaaS allows you to deploy applications and the rest of the things will be managed by the cloud. Cloud will manage how to deploy the servers to run the application.
✔ FaaS offers the capability to deploy what is actually a single function or a part of a function.
✔ Most PaaS hosting options can auto-scale the number of servers to handle workloads. PaaS makes it simple to deploy the entire function or application.
✔ FaaS was created in a way so that it can work as a Serverless Architecture.
✔ When an application spins-up, FaaS can be invoked in a much more agile manner than PaaS.
✔ In PaaS, you will have a lot more control over the development environment, and in FaaS, you won’t have much control over the same.
✔ Both, PaaS and FaaS can easily deploy and scale an application without having to configure the server.
Primary features of FaaS and PaaS
Check out some of the primary characteristics of FaaS and PaaS:
Serverless or FaaS Characteristics:
- Cost provisioned.
- Less dependency on code.
- Micromanaged.
- Operational with fewer errors.
- Complete auto-scaling functionality.
PaaS Characteristics:
- Easy to use and manage.
- Highly efficient.
- Scalable.
- Offer better developer control.
- Offer limited management responsibilities.
When to Use Serverless or FaaS?
- Serverless Architecture does not work for every organization. However, it works for most of the companies because of the advantage of the pay-as-you-go feature. That means you only have to pay for what you have used. This way, companies can save a lot of money by not paying for idle time.
- It is suitable for stateless applications. For example, applications that don’t maintain user state and data for long periods.
- If your website is a high-traffic website, then serverless can be the best option. You can host your static website on S3 bucket which helps you with a global and faster cloud. It is cheaper and fast, but it’s highly available and scalable at the same time.
- It is cost-effective for those applications that don’t need all of the components to run all the time. You can also run serverless to run a web server with routing.
- The most popular use case is Multimedia Processing Applications. To store images and videos of your business you can use a scalable storage service like Amazon/AWS S3. You can automate this process by configuring a function to be invoked from an image or video to upload.
- Serverless architecture is ideal for Mobile Backends. An API provides an entry point to functions. And these functions can be exposed as the rest API that your mobile app consumes. AWS AppSync allows you to securely access data from multiple sources in real-time.
Note that Serverless Architecture is not well-suited for long, compute-intensive apps. Because it can be expensive as compared to running code on a dedicated compute instance.
So before moving to a Serverless Architecture, measure and validate each use case and see if this will work for your organization or not. Serverless does have numerous advantages but it does come with some drawbacks, too.
We hope this article will help you to understand how to leverage Serverless Architecture for your business.
