What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing is a cloud computing model that enables the creation and deployment of applications and services without dealing with servers, operating systems, or physical infrastructure.

It is deployed on a demand basis, whereby resources are accorded to consumers depending on their demand, and consumers pay depending on their usage. Serverless computing shifts developers’ focus from infrastructure management to coding, supporting agility and development cycles.

It is also crucial to note that with serverless computing, the role of infrastructure management is transferred from the user to the provider.

There are different ways to classify serverless computing based on the events used to allocate the resources. This understanding will assist in determining the appropriate type of serverless architecture for various situations and improving the ability to manage resources.

• Data processing events: These start serverless functions when new data is received, or or when a specific deed of data processing is required. Used preferentially in real-time analysis applications.
• Database changes: These serverless functions respond to changes in a database.
• Cloud storage events:  Initiated by file upload or change in the cloud storage, these events are ideal for the processing of the uploaded data or executing workflows.
• IoT events: Serverless functions are ideal to run the intermittent data and response time commonly related to IoT devices.

• Cost Efficiency: Serverless works on a pay-as-you-go basis where you are charged based on the actual time your functions are computing.
• Developer Efficiency: Developers concentrate on writing code for efficiency while leaving server management to specialized organizations.
• Automatic Scalability: Serverless platforms manage the distribution and scalability of an application.
• Accelerated Innovation: In order to speed up Innovation or experimentation, organizations can adopt serverless computing as a way.
• Serverless Implementation: Serverless computing lets programmers build and run applications without managing servers or infrastructure.

Serverless computing is a model that is very different from traditional hosting. Serverless architecture entails level of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and elasticity in contrast to server administration.

Serverless computing allows building applications that would perform well with minimal overall management of the underlying structures as opposed to traditional servers or VMS.

Different from conventional configurations where the development team pre-purchases server capacity, serverless architecture provides automatic scaling. 

One of the possible differences is that debugging and error handling in serverless environments may be more complicated than with traditional hosted applications.

Serverless computing has its strengths and weaknesses. It is suitable for cases where an application’s traffic or processing load varies over time, with the need for occasional bursts of intensive processing.

When your application involves real-time streaming and the minimum latency is desirable with maximum throughput, serverless is the best option. However, for more deterministic types of workloads, containers could be a better match.

One of the key benefits of serverless is that it gradually scales for infrequent access, while containers are based on manual scaling. For instance, serverless function is ideal for an application to manage a one-off event like a traffic rush to the website.  

Developers are not required to intervene to expand the framework. While a monolithic application can handle a gradual increase of traffic over some period of time an e-commerce platform would be more effective when using a containerized application.

Serverless computing brings several new opportunities, but it also comes with many challenges and limitations.

• One form of invocation latency is the cold starts, where operations take longer to respond when they have not been used for some time.
• Vendor lock-in, mostly because processing is delegated to particular tools and services provided by the cloud provider, can be demanding regarding the switchover process to other providers.
• Debugging in a serverless environment is challenging because there is no physical access to the programming environment or direct reflection on its code.