assistant: The cost of maintaining a serverless application versus hosting a backend on a server can depend on a variety of factors, such as the size and complexity of the application, the expected traffic, and the specific cloud provider and pricing model being used. In general, serverless computing can offer cost savings due to its pay-per-use pricing model and automatic scaling, while hosting a backend on a server can be more expensive due to upfront costs for hardware and ongoing maintenance and administration costs.

For a digital marketplace, serverless computing can offer some advantages in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness, particularly if the traffic to the application varies significantly over time. Serverless architectures can scale up or down automatically based on traffic, which can help to ensure that the application is always responsive and available without requiring manual intervention or overprovisioning of resources. Additionally, serverless computing typically offers a pay-per-use pricing model, which can be cost-effective for applications with variable traffic patterns.

However, it is important to carefully consider the specific requirements of the digital marketplace and choose the approach that is most appropriate. Factors such as security, reliability, and the need for customizability and control over the infrastructure may favor hosting a backend on a server. It may be beneficial to consult with a cloud computing expert or experienced software engineer to determine the best approach for your particular use case.

assistant: For serverless apps, the limit is based on how much processing power, RAM, or storage the machine has, hereas for hosting the backend on a server, one is limited by the hardware of the server, but if the backend is designed for it, the work can distributed amongst several servers and more can be added to accommodate higher workloads.

prompter: How is being limited by processing power, RAM, and storage different from being limited by the hardware of the server?
If there is no difference, is it possible to rewrite any app to be serverless?

assistant: With serverless hosting, the resources available to each instance of your application are limited, but many instances of your application can be run in parallel. The exact limits on each may depend on the hosting service and possibly the region that the application is hosted in. Typically serverless hosting providers allow a large number of instances to be run in parallel, and can rapidly scale the number of running instances up and down.

Instances of the application can be started and terminated at any time by the hosting provider, and this is not suitable for all applications. Examples of the factors that may impact whether an application is suitable for serverless hosting include:
- State: Serverless applications cannot rely on locally stored state. State should be managed using one or more external services such as a database. Locally cached may also not be preserved. An external caching service can be used, however this will add additional costs and latency.
- Concurrency: If the application makes any assumptions that require that only one instance is active at a time then it will likely not be suitable for serverless hosting.
- Resource requirements: Individual instances of the application may require more resources than the serverless hosting provider makes available, for example because it needs to keep a large amount of data in fast local memory.
- Specialized hardware: The application may require specialized hardware that is not available with serverless hosting. For example, some machine learning workloads may require GPUs to run efficiently.

The suitability of serverless hosting for a given application will depend on the specific requirements and context for that application and its usage.

assistant: The difference between being limited by processing power, RAM, and storage and being limited by the hardware of the server is that in the former case, the limitations are imposed by the resources available to the application running on a server. It is possible to rewrite an app to be serverless, but it’s not always straightforward .