Serverless computing reduces application deployment costs by allowing developers to pay based on what they use. It also enables higher scalability by leveraging cloud-based infrastructure for dynamically allocating and de-allocating computing resources.
Developers don’t have to worry about software patching and hardware maintenance, which saves them time. However, the technology could face several security issues. These include side channel attacks.
Cloudnative architecture
In serverless architecture, back-end services such as REST APIs, databases, authentication, email, and video processing find a home in the cloud. These back-end services are triggered by user action and can be scaled to meet demand without requiring developers to forecast traffic or allocate space. This approach also eliminates the need to update operating systems or install frameworks.
The cloud provider handles many of the same management tasks that developers would perform on their own servers, including system monitoring and capacity planning. It can even rebalance resources to compensate for periods of underutilization or idle time, making it a more cost-efficient model than traditional virtual machines and containers.
A serverless application architecture makes it easier for developers to iterate on their code and deploy new features faster, which is critical in a fast-changing digital landscape. However, it is still important to monitor your serverless environment and ensure that everything is working as expected. Dynatrace’s Software Intelligence Platform automatically discovers your serverless applications, captures metrics, logs, traces, and user experience data, and delivers customizable dashboards.
Microservices architecture
Serverless architecture allows developers to build and deploy applications with microservices. Each microservice runs independently in a cloud environment and can scale according to demand. This model can improve development speed and reliability and reduce infrastructure costs. It also helps developers focus on building and maintaining the application rather than worrying about managing infrastructure.
Developers write application code and load it into the serverless computing environment, where it stays dormant until a user action triggers a function. Then, the vendor takes over and executes the code in the cloud environment. This is known as the Function as a Service (FaaS) model. The code can run on multiple servers and be accessed from anywhere.
Some challenges to implementing this approach include increased network congestion and latency because of the numerous interservice communication. Also, each service is responsible for its own data persistence and logging. This can complicate debugging and require a mature DevOps culture to manage.
Event-driven architecture
A serverless event-driven architecture uses a series of loosely-coupled services to handle events in real time. An event can be generated by any source, such as an HTTP request, a cron job, or an IoT device. It’s represented as a message and delivered to an event router such as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams or AWS Lambda. The event is then routed to the appropriate destination in real time.
The event-driven architecture can improve application flexibility and performance. It also reduces complexity and costs by removing the burden of managing infrastructure. This is particularly beneficial for developers and IT teams, who can focus on deploying, designing, and optimizing the application.
A serverless architecture can also scale up and down to meet demand. For example, a Lambda function can automatically scale to handle a surge in traffic and then back down when the spike is over. This allows developers to pay only for the compute time they use and eliminates unnecessary costs.
Hybrid architecture
With serverless architecture, developers don’t have to worry about maintaining servers or managing the underlying infrastructure. Cloud providers handle these tasks for them, so developers can focus on application code and creating features that customers will find valuable.
Serverless architecture uses managed services such as API gateways for receiving network requests, compute platforms that execute functions on incoming network calls without any maintenance, fully-managed datastores to store and retrieve data, and messaging services for queues, pub/sub, and streams. Combined, these can provide complete application functionality. Developers can scale applications based on traffic, and developers are charged only for the resources they use.
Serverless computing is a great choice for companies that want to speed up their development processes. However, it’s important to keep in mind that it is not a replacement for traditional servers. It’s a complementary technology that makes the whole IT infrastructure more efficient. It also enables enterprises to deploy and manage their applications across multiple execution venues.