Introduction to Serverless Computing
Invention of Servers allowed us to store, retrieve and send data to other computers, using a network. Servers have been the driving force in evolving technology since many years. This gave birth to large data centers, consisting of many servers under one roof. Companies requiring large amounts of data processing powers, started creating their own data centers on their own premises. However, this model has lost some of its popularity since last few years due to increasing popularity of cloud services. Cloud services have brought with them a new type of architecture. Cloud services have made possible to design a server-less architecture. In this article, we would be exploring the concept of server-less computing, and would be analyzing benefits of server-less computing compared to sever architecture.
Concept of Server-less computing
The name “server-less” means that a computing architecture, which does not require the use of servers in the architecture. However, this does not mean that there is no presence of server. This is a common misconception with server-less computing architecture. In this concept, cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. The person deploying the application does not actually own, manage or run the server. Server-less computing gives a fourth type of cloud computing concept, FaaS (Function as a Service). We can simply deploy the code into production without actually worrying about the servers. In server-less computing, the managerial tasks like server provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance etc. are done by the cloud provider itself.
Some of the common server-less computing services are provided by Amazon with their Amazon Lambda Function, IBM with their IBM Cloud Functions, Microsoft with their Microsoft Azure Functions and Oracle with their Oracle Functions.
Benefits of Serverless Computing
The main reason of increasing popularity of server-less systems is due to the amount of cost and other benefits that server-less architecture provides. Here are some of the benefits, that sever-less computing architecture provides:
- Developer does not have to worry about various tasks like software patching, operating system maintenance, resource allocation etc.
- Developer can focus his time and resources only on optimizing source code to develop a better application.
- Server-less computing provides higher scalability by dynamically allocating and de-allocating computing resources according to the requirement.
- Total cost is solely based upon the amount of time and storage allocated to run the code.
- The developer does not have to deal with the initial capital investment required to build the on-premises data center.
Limitations of Serverless Computing
With immense number of benefits, server-less computing architectures comes with few drawbacks. Here are a few limitations of using server-less architectures:
- Cold starts are a big problem in server-less architectures. If we require a new server to scale up the architecture, there may be a requirement to start a server from shut-down state. These cold starts represent a the delay of starting the server. This causes a delay in user experience.
- Privacy and Security is another concern since some legal compliance may prohibit some data-sensitive applications from deploying on server-less cloud premises.
- There are some performance limitations to server-less computing architectures, which limits deployment of high-performance applications on it. This is mainly due to resource limits by cloud providers.
Irrespective of all limitations, server-less applications will continue to gain popularity. Server-less computing is making on-premises data-centers obsolete. Applications deployed in this way will continue to transform technology as people will be able to deploy their applications with less amount of effort, knowledge and money.
