The term Serverless Computing is a sort of Cloud Computing technique. To have a serverless computing infrastructure, users do not need to have physical servers to run backend code. Instead the users can access services as they need. These services are provided by the cloud services providers such as AWS and Azure. The users only need to pay for the services they intend to use. Also Read- What is Cloudification? Serverless Architecture is an event driven, scalable concept. The resources used by Serverless computing are utilised only when some specific function is performed, or some event occurs. Serverless computing is a technique of cloud computing. Here the user requests for container platform as a Service (PaaS). This PaaS is controlled by the provider. The users are completely relieved from getting physical servers ready before hand. Serverless Computing does not mean that there are no servers involved. It aims at providing servers as scalable cloud services.
What is Serverless Architecture?
Serverless Architecture is a concept that allows the developers to create and execute applications without the pressure to manage infrastructure. The application definitely runs on servers. The only difference is that these servers are on the cloud services. Since these are on the cloud services, they are managed by the cloud service providers. The Serverless computing Architecture can be used in either on-premise or in the cloud.
Who provides Serverless computing?
Serverless computing is mainly cloud Architecture. AWS and Azure have spread its wings to capture this field. But AWS had initiated the shift of operational responsibilities.
Capabilities of AWS Serverless Platform
AWS Serverless Computing has many features. Some of the features may be listed as under:
- Cloud Logic Layer: AWS Lambda powers business logic. This behaves as control plane and logic layer for all the interconnected infrastructure resources and web API’s.
- Orchestration and State Management: AWS Step functions co-ordinates and manages each distributed component on any serverless application.
- Responsive Data sources: The AWS serverless computing selects from a broad data set source. The users use the data to trigger real-time events. AWS Serverless platform gives users a complete set of managed services to use to build and run serverless applications. Users need not worry about fault tolerance and availability. AWS Serverless Computing handles all these issues. Also Read- What is Edge Computing? AWS Lambda provides to run code without server management. Lambda@Edge runs lambda function at AWS edge locations.
Advantages of Serverless Computing
- Low costs: Since the Serverless Computing Service is mostly on the cloud, users need to pay only for the resources that they use and not the resources that they don’t use.
- Scalable: Since the facilities and provisions are mostly on the cloud, this gives it an advantage to increase the size of the architecture to a much larger extent.
- Simple Backend Code: the simple Backend codes just need to be written on the services without considering the infrastructure details.
- Quick turn Around: The Serverless computing provision is quite easy to handle with when compared to physical servers.
Azure Serverless Computing
After AWS, Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services has also gone a long way to introduce Serverless Computing. Azure Serverless Computing has already registered some applications under its name such as:
- Web application Backends
- Mobile Application Backends
- Real Time File Processing
- Real time Stream Processing Some of the Azure Services supporting Serverless Computing are: 1 Azure Container Instance
- AKS
- Service Fabric Mesh
- Cosmos DB
- Event Grid
- Logic apps and many more. We hope the mystery of ‘What is Serverless computing?‘ is solved.
