Chithrai Mani Director of Architecture and Delivery - Talking About Cloud Serverless Technology Serverless technology is the new stride of the current technology world. It refers to the computing of an event-driven application, its design and deployment for computing the various associated resources in terms of scalable cloud services. The traditional applications along with server's computing resources comprised of both fixed and dynamic costs association, regardless of the computing work the server performed. But, a serverless computing technology demands the customers to only pay for the service usage without getting involved in the unnecessary costs associated with the idle or downtime. The concept doesn't eliminate servers but emphasizes the idea of moving the computing resource considerations to the background right at the design phase. This concept is also referred as "function as a service (Faas)" or "runtime as a service (RaaS)."
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Serverless Evaluation
Serverless cloud computing is also considered as the next layer of abstraction. The technology has transformed from the IAAS to PAAS and finally led to being called as Serverless technology. Amazon's AWS Lambda, IBM's OpenWhisk, Microsoft's Azure Function, and Google cloud Function are a few examples of the public cloud serverless computing service providers. Here, developers can put up their codes, create the backend applications, develop various event handling routines, and also process data without having to worry about the servers, virtual machines (VMs), or the other foundational compute resources that are required to sustain large chunks of a data and events. This is mainly because the provider, itself maintains the entire actual hardware and the infrastructure involved in such process.
Sample AWS Serverless Architecture
Advantages of Serverless Technology Even though there are a limited number of service providers in the serverless world, still, its benefits are immense. This is the reason that the technology stands well in demand by various companies and organisations.
Let's have a look at the five significant advantages of serverless technology as mentioned below:✓ Reduced Time to Market Serverless approaches give way for the developers to create their new apps in just hours or days instead of the traditional weeks and months that were involved earlier. Example: authentication (OAuth), maps (Mapbox), social (Twitter), artificial intelligence (IBM's Watson), etc. ✓ Superior Scalability Serverless architecture gives enough scalability offers so that when success strikes, one is always ready to handle it. The serverless technology is well scaled to take up even 40,000 users within just six months without a single server. ✓ Lowered Cost Serverless helps in saving costs of computing power and human resources, as well. It well optimizes all sorts of concerns such as authorization, image processing, and even presence detection. This means you don't have to invest in servers or the operational costs, separately unnecessarily. ✓ Higher Time for Better User Experience
Front users are least concerned about the infrastructure or the technology implemented. In fact, all they care about is the featured experiences they receive. Serverless architecture helps the developer team to stay focussed on the resources on such elements that keeps the users contented. This is how one can make use of a serverless infrastructure for offering a rich interface for a real-time view of the operations, decisions, and other enhanced operations. ✓ Superior Latency and Geo-location Factors The ability of an app's scalability depends on three major things: the number of users, their locations, and the network latency. Currently, with the global audiences coming in the picture, latency can create diminishing experiences. However, with the concept of going serverless, service providers can have their presence points proximate to every user; therefore, the apps they provide works equally well for all. Such apps are well aligned with low-latency experiences, real-time messaging for staying connected with the users and streaming geo-location updates.
How Start-ups can Power Themselves with Serverless Computing for Building Applications Serverless computing goes 100% flexible and highly cost-effective for the developers to test and deploy functions of the applications for all types of enterprises. It has been; therefore, the most favourite talk amongst the start-ups looking for cost-effective ways to take their business on a global scale. Serverless computing is also known as the Function-as-a-Service and is expected to be the next big thing in the world of cloud service delivery models. With this, the enterprises are getting even smarter. To be precise, start-ups are envisioning their future with the serverless approach at the highest level. The prime focus of the start-ups is to receive better resource management, stay flexible with utmost reliability, and cost-optimized ways. Going serverless can be a higher leveraging factor for these start-ups in the following manner-
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Serverless Technology Will be used for Building MVPs It is mainly due to the exceptional agility level of the concept of serverless computing that it will popularly be used by the major to minor enterprises for building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). This means serverless will turn out to be a major swivel for the start-ups altogether. With this, they wouldn't further need any separate IT resources till their app developed doesn't pass the initial validation phase. Serverless also offers complete flexibility in modifying the start-ups and their functions which makes it even more straightforward to alter their MVPs at any time.
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Serverless Will Transform the Way Start-ups Use IoT Apps IoT apps play a vital role in transforming the business scenarios for the start-ups by adding the ability to their operations. Most of the IoT implementations are accurate, task-specific, short-term, and enormous. Serverless computing thus remains the best
platform for rendering a distributed system architecture that well aligns with its capabilities. Serverless approach innovatively helps it efficiently building a stable IoT system that is well focused towards the enhanced productivity. â–Ş
Open Source Serverless Frameworks are On High Rise Serverless architectures, such as AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Fission, IBM Bluemix, Iron.io, and the Google Cloud Platform are on a high rise today. They offer complete freedom for various start-ups for exploring more enormous possibilities of the serverless computing without involving any commercial constraints.
Currently, only a few vendors are offering serverless technologies namely, Amazon's AWS Lambda, IBM's OpenWhisk, Microsoft's Azure Function, and Google cloud function that is currently dominating the serverless cloud landscape but, very soon the concept is going to be spread around due to the major business benefits associated with it.
Author Chithrai Mani -Director of Architecture and Delivery