Why Serverless Architecture Will Be The Future Of Business Computing?
By: Adem Zeina
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Productivity, Web Development, Serverless

Serverless is currently a trending topic which will definitely be a major hit within the next few years. In the future, you won’t have to worry about the infrastructure, as your complete software life cycle will depend on cloud service providers.

WHAT IS SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE?

Initially, the definition of serverless architecture was limited to applications that are dependent on third-party services in the cloud. These 3rd party apps or services would manage server-side logic and state. Alongside a related term — Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) also became popular. MBaaS is a form of cloud computing that makes it easier for developers to use the ecosystem of cloud accessible databases such as Heroku, Firebase, and authentication services like Auth0 and AWS Cognito.

But now serverless architecture is defined by stateless compute containers and modeled for an event-driven solution. AWS Lambda is the perfect example of serverless architecture and employs Functions as a service (FaaS) model of cloud computing.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) architectures popularized by Salesforce Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Microsoft Azure simplifies application deployment for developers. And serverless architecture or FaaS is the next step in that direction.

FaaS provides a platform allowing the developers to execute code in response to events without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure. Thus despite the name ‘serverless’, it does require servers to run code. The term serverless signifies the organization or person doesn’t need to purchase, rent, or provision servers or virtual machines to develop the application.

Servers still run your application. But a third-party company takes care of the grunt work of provisioning, managing, and scaling servers. In serverless architecture, you manage and provision nothing.

Serverless architecture often incorporates two components:

Function as a Service.

Backend as a Service.

FaaS is a computing service that allows you to run self-contained code snippets called functions in the cloud. Your functions remain dormant until events trigger them. Functions are self-contained, small, short-lived, and single-purpose. They die after execution.

is a computing service that allows you to run self-contained code snippets called functions in the cloud. Your functions remain dormant until events trigger them. Functions are self-contained, small, short-lived, and single-purpose. They die after execution. BaaS is a cloud computing service that completely abstracts backend logic, which takes place on faraway servers. It allows developers to focus on front-end code and integrate with back-end logic that someone else has implemented. BaaS could be authentication, storage services, geolocation services, user management, and so on.

In serverless architecture, you focus on writing code only. You deploy when you’re ready, without caring about what runs it or how it runs.

MICROSERVICES TO FAAS

Serverless code written using FaaS can be used in conjunction with code written in traditional server style, such as microservices. In a microservice architecture, monolithic applications are broken down into smaller services so you can develop, manage, and scale them independently. And FaaS takes that a step further by breaking applications to the level of functions and events.

There will always be a place for both microservices and FaaS. For example, the code for a web application is partly as a microservices and partly as a serverless code. Also, some things you can’t do with functions, like keep an open WebSocket connection for a bot for an instance. Here an API/microservice will almost always be able to respond faster since it can keep connections to databases and other things open and ready.

Another interesting explanation- you can have a microservice by grouping a set of functions together using an API gateway. So microservices and FaaS can coexist in a nice way. The end-user is least bothered about your API is implemented as a single app or a bunch of functions, it still acts the same.

Why Use Serverless Architecture?

As you ponder this question, consider these three key attributes of serverless architecture.

It’s scalable and highly available . Scaling traditional applications requires you to understand your traffic pattern. You estimate how much of each resource you’d need, and then you’d provision accordingly. Users troop in from all geographical regions to use modern applications. A traditional application could be overwhelmed by a spike — probably on a black Friday. In serverless, your application is highly available, and it scales automatically as your users grow, and usage increases.

. Scaling traditional applications requires you to understand your traffic pattern. You estimate how much of each resource you’d need, and then you’d provision accordingly. Users troop in from all geographical regions to use modern applications. A traditional application could be overwhelmed by a spike — probably on a black Friday. In serverless, your application is highly available, and it scales automatically as your users grow, and usage increases. It costs less. One of the reasons serverless architecture is gaining popularity among startups is because of its pricing model. The cost of running servers 24/7 and paying for idle time is no longer an issue in serverless. You pay for usage only. Functions have allocated time in which they run and die afterward. The provider charges based on the number of executions and the size of memory your workload uses. This helps you optimize costs.

One of the reasons serverless architecture is gaining popularity among startups is because of its pricing model. The cost of running servers 24/7 and paying for idle time is no longer an issue in serverless. You pay for usage only. Functions have allocated time in which they run and die afterward. The provider charges based on the number of executions and the size of memory your workload uses. This helps you optimize costs. The time to market is faster. Operational tasks such as server provisioning, maintenance, and monitoring infrastructure are off your shoulders. You can focus solely on your business logic (code), experiment with ideas, and hit production on time.

Examples of serverless architecture use cases are:

1. High-Traffic Websites

If you’re still serving your static websites from an EC2 instance, you may be missing out on a lot. With serverless, you can host your static website on S3 bucket and serve your assets with a global, fast cloud delivery network. Not only is it cheaper and fast, but it is also highly available and scalable.

2. Multimedia Processing Applications

If your business deals with images and videos, then serverless architecture might work well for you. You can use a scalable storage service such as AWS S3 to store your data. An upload event can trigger a lambda function after each successful upload that processes your file asynchronously. Your users can continue to enjoy your app while a highly available and scalable back-end service processes the upload in a non-blocking way.

3. Mobile Backends

An API gateway gives you an entry point to your business functions. These functions can be exposed as rest API that your mobile app consumes. Serverless services such as AWS AppSync allow you to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from multiple sources in real-time.

4. Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT devices generate a lot of data from their environments through sensors. Organizations often struggle to process this overwhelming data coming from these connected devices in a scalable way. Using a serverless back end like AWS IoT Core, you can scale to billions of devices and trillions of messages.

5. Automate CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continous Delivery are practices that empower developers to integrate and deliver code frequently and reliably. You can leverage on serverless to automate your CI/CD workflows. An event from developers’ code check-ins could trigger automated tests or even deploy to production.

6. Big Data Applications

Before cloud computing, the insights big data provided were available only to big enterprises because organizations needed the infrastructures’ overheads to make sense of that data. Setting up and maintaining infrastructures for big data isn’t easy. With serverless computing, your app can now take advantage of several services, including Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue, and AWS Lambda to build scalable data pipelines.

Earlier, I mentioned that serverless architecture isn’t a silver bullet. There are cases where serverless might not be a good fit.

Serverless Applications Monitoring

One of the critical aspects of any application in production is monitoring.

Full visibility is vital for debugging and for taking proactive steps when things are about to go wrong. This is even more important in a serverless environment where you use a backend component managed by someone else.

At first, complete visibility into serverless apps was not intuitive. Over the years, as serverless architectures have gained widespread, sophisticated monitoring tools have begun to emerge. Services like Scalyr, CloudWatch, DataDog, Epsagon allow you to see updates with robust alerting systems before they affect your users. These modern monitoring tools allow for seamless integrations.

Serverless Compute Platforms

we’ll look at three serverless computing platforms to get you started.

1. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning servers. It was introduced in 2014 and has grown ever since. According to a report, AWS Lambda has the largest market share of all serverless computing platforms. If your code in Java, Go, Powershell, Node.js, C#, Python, or Ruby, you’re in luck. AWS Lambda natively supports their runtimes.

2. Azure Functions

Azure Functions is a serverless platform offering from Microsoft. It allows you to build, run code at scale without the grunt work of server provisioning. At the time of writing this post, Azure functions support C#, Javascript, F#, Java, PowerShell, Python, and Typescript.

3. Cloud Functions

Cloud Functions is an event-driven serverless compute platform from Google Cloud. As stated on the cloud function’s official page, write your code and let Google take care of the operational overhead. Google cloud function is one of the leading serverless platforms to run your code. At the time of writing this post, cloud functions support Node.js, Python, and Go runtimes.

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