What is Serverless Application Development?
Tags: webdev, aws, api, serverless
Published: 2019-08-19 11:56:54

---
title: What is Serverless Application Development?
published: True
description: What is serverless architecture? Why Serverless architecture? What is AWS Lambda? What is serverless deployment?
tags: #webdev #aws #api #serverless
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/qlmmnk03m5cgb9dz52xk.png
---

What is Serverless Web Application Development? Serverless web application development is an emerging trend that’s gaining immense popularity. The term Serverless itself sounds confusing as it is not possible to run a web application without servers so what does it actually mean. Although the use of this confusing term seems a marketing trick to intrigue the curious minds from a different perspective, it is a crystal-clear meaningful term.

***What is Serverless Architecture?***

Serverless architecture means the use of computing runtimes, also known as function as a service (FaaS) platforms, which execute application logic but do not store the data. The model offers a completely different economic model of “Pay as you Go” instead of the conventional ways of renting servers and setting up server instances to deploy the code.

***Full article source: https://www.decipherzone.com/blog-detail/What-is-serverless-web-application-development***

Serverless Architecture is the base of serverless computing, a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of hardware capacity.

Read: [What is an API and How it works?](https://www.decipherzone.com/blog-detail/What-is-an-API-and-How-it-works-)

Serverless computing can simplify the process of deploying code into production. Scaling, capacity planning and maintenance operations may be hidden from the developer or operator. Serverless code can be used in conjunction with previously deployed code in traditional styles, such as microservices.

***Why Serverless Architecture?***

Serverless architecture offers “Pay as you Go” model which is perfect for code where you have to just send simple responses to IOT devices or upload an image or a document.

The function as a service (FaaS) platform offers dynamic scalability of machine resources in runtime.

In runtime function as a service, the platform finds empty instances on the cloud to run the code when a response is requested from client machines. Hence there is high latency in this architecture so it should not be used to a whole web application.

Serverless architecture is best for hosting functions that require high computation power like OCR engines, K-MAP solvers and Linear programming solvers.

To put this, in other words, the part of code for which you require a response or solution even if a billion user simultaneously request that code then you must host that code in serverless architecture in conjunction with rest of the code running on a separate server instance.

***What is AWS Lambda?***

AWS Lambda with maximum features availability is the best function as a service platform as of the writing of this article. AWS Lambda has gigantic competitors Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, OpenWhisk by IBM Cloud Functions, Project Riff and Oracle Fn Project.

Read: [Top Web Development Technologies and Frameworks](https://www.decipherzone.com/blog-detail/Top-Web-Development-Technologies-and-Frameworks)

Behind the curtains, every AWS service invokes AWS Lambda web service API to serve distinct server instances running different AWS services like S3 bucket, DynamoDB, EC2 instance. Now AWS has given access to users on this API which has allowed them to perform tasks on a lower level like hosting the code of an API without even configuring new server instance. The APIs code when run it searches and claims empty server instances to host the API.

Read: [Why Progressive Web Application Development Is Trending?](https://www.decipherzone.com/blog-detail/Why-Progressive-Web-Application-Development-Is-Trending-)

AWS Lambda can be controlled through its web application console and the code, the Admin can manage the access of users. AWS Lambda function can be invoked in 4 ways as following:

![Serverless](https://ares.decipherzone.com/blog-manager/uploads/ckeditor_aws%20gateway.png)

Read the full article here: https://www.decipherzone.com/blog-detail/What-is-serverless-web-application-development