What is Serverless Computing? Architecture, Benefits, and Limitations

Building and scaling web applications used to require renting virtual machines, installing operating systems, and working with physical hardware infrastructure. Engineers would spend countless hours setting up sufficient server resources to keep web applications operational during traffic peaks. 

Cloud computing paradigms have been improved over time to make engineering teams forget about maintenance issues altogether and concentrate only on developing applications.

Switching to new paradigms of serverless computing implies handing the responsibility for infrastructure management to the third-party cloud vendors. This paradigm is event-driven and dramatically changes the way modern cloud applications are being developed by engineering teams.

Basics of the Concept: What is Serverless Computing?

Though it might sound confusing, servers are not disappearing at all. Physical hardware will run applications within remote cloud data centers. Serverless computing just means that engineering teams do not need to work with servers themselves anymore.

It means that there is no need to rent virtual machines all the time; companies will delegate responsibilities to cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. The code will be executed in stateless containers in response to particular events and will scale immediately depending on demand.

How the Serverless Architecture Works

To understand the process of serverless computing, one must consider how it works from the point of view of its basic principle – Function as a Service (FaaS). 

FaaS makes it possible to create modular, purposeful functions executed in response to HTTP requests, changes in databases, or file uploads. The basic components of setting up a serverless application include:

• Triggers for Events: A user’s request coming in, modification of a database, or a scheduled cron job triggers an execution chain.
• Transient Execution: Computing platforms start executing the requested code function in ephemeral computing containers.
• Stateless Execution: The functions have no state stored between executions but use external databases or storage buckets for keeping state.
• Pricing by Usage: Organizations are charged for the actual compute time used, even to the millisecond, without paying for server idleness.

Advantages of Adopting Serverless Architecture

Moving from normal servers to event-based computing provides the following key benefits:

• Automatic Scalability

  A serverless architecture can manage sudden surges in traffic without any need for human involvement. In case thousands of requests come at once, the cloud infrastructure will automatically launch thousands of compute resources to handle those requests.

• Reduced Operational Efforts

  Engineers don’t have to devote their precious time to ensuring OS security updates, load balancing, and monitoring the health of their servers, enabling quicker deployments of products.

• Improved Cost Efficiency

  Since the company pays for the actual usage time and not for idle server capacity, it is completely free from compute costs when there is no request at all.

Challenges and Limitations

In spite of the benefits brought by serverless architecture in deployment processes, software engineers should be aware of particular limitations during the creation of enterprise-scale applications:

• Cold Starts: In case a function was idle for a certain period, the cloud vendor shuts off its container runtime. Further on, any incoming calls will have to suffer from a small delay due to reinitialization of the runtime.
• Vendor Lock-in: Moving proprietary serverless functions, database triggers, and platform settings from one cloud provider to another may involve substantial rewrites of code.
• Debugging and Monitoring: Finding bugs in distributed and transient microservices involves the use of particular observability techniques and detailed logs.
• Long Running Operations: The execution of serverless functions is always associated with strict limitations related to timeouts, which makes this approach inappropriate for video encoding and heavy calculations.

Also Read: What is SaaS Observability Platform? Monitoring Cloud Applications

Conclusion

Knowing what serverless computing is and how it works helps understand why it became so popular among organizations in recent years. Being a combination of FaaS technology and automatic scaling, this approach helps speed up cloud application development, reducing the cost of cloud infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions