What is Serverless

For ages the frontend and backend of sites have been hosted on individual servers. Serverless allows you to execute application logic without visible processes, servers, virtual machines, or operation systems.

Serverless allows developers to focus purely on the code and let the Iaas(Infrastructure as a service) handle the deployment and execution in production. This has numerous benefits of which we will go over in this post.

The Hype Behind Serverless

The Serverless market is expected to reach around 18.04 billion globally This incites massive growth in this market is expected by many, but what is Serverless? What has millions of developers switching to Serverless?

How It Works

The most popular Serverless service is Amazon Web Service's AWS Lambda works by using functions. Functions are the core of Serverless. You can upload your code and then set a trigger that can set off and run that code. This has been done before so what makes Serverless so great? Serverless is pure compute power. This makes it infinitely easier to scale as you don't have to manage containers and kubernetes clusters along with many other major benefits.

The primary use cases of Serverless is web deployment and ML but has benefits everywhere. You can set a function to run when a URL request is triggered.

The Pros of Serverless

The main pros for Serverless are

Lower Costs
Infinitely easier to scale
Better uptime
Easier to deploy
Faster Development
Faster Respond time
More Flexibility
More Efficient

Serverless removes developers working on managing servers in the cloud using services like docker and kubernetes. Since the code is no longer on servers you can scale infinitely easier and faster. No more times when a developer will be called in the night with the message "The server is down" and be forced to run back into and identify the problem in the night. With Serverless you have virtually no infrastructure to maintain, just watch the requests and watch it scale infinitely. Serverless also has 0 costs when its not running and is cheaper when its just compute power. For each request the cloud spins up a new service running the code on request.

The Cons of Serverless

The primary cons of Serverless architecture.

Vendor Lock In
Debugging
Local Testing
Migration
Legacy Code and Infrastructure

Serverless functions are triggered by actions that will often require a development solution inside the written code. This makes it harder to switch between services and lock you into the service you have chosen. This can make things difficult when you have better options for services in the long run.

Debugging in production is often difficult in a Serverless architecture. Not having terminal access and having is spin up a new function on every trigger makes it hard to track these processes. Testing locally can also be more difficult when your code is configured to trigger on functions.

Legacy code is still common and running legacy code on cloud functions not adapted to the service is extremely difficult. Most services and projects were built to run programs on servers and so Serverless architecture has been adapted to fit with servers on its best. Serverless functions cannot correctly return status properly codes over http as http was built in mind with servers and programming in general adapted those standards. Migration to Serverless can be difficult.

Summary