Serverless computing, or computing without servers, is an evolution of the cloud. Based on the idea of Backend as a Service, serverless eliminates an operational layer of servers that are always on and allocates their resources in the cloud.
This new serverless cloud model rapidly consolidates itself in the market by offering more flexibility and cost-effectiveness than established services. It is an architecture where code execution is fully managed by a cloud provider, as opposed to the traditional application development method and direct installation on servers.
If you already use cloud computing but want to get more out of it without worrying about implementation, adequacy, and frequent demand adjustments, it’s time to learn serverless computing.
What Is Serverless Computing?
If you’ve never heard the term, the idea of serverless computing must be strange. The truth is that, despite the terminology, serverless computing does not mean that we will abandon (yet) the need for a structure to maintain the operation within a company.
Serverless computing is an evolution of cloud computing. This type of computing still requires servers, and it doesn’t exactly reflect what the name implies.
The nomenclature Serverless Computing is used because server capacity planning and management decisions are hidden from the developer or operator — a practice often referred to as Backend as a Service.
This means developers don’t have to worry about managing, provisioning, and maintaining servers when deploying code. Previously, a developer would have to define the storage and database capacity needed before deployment, slowing down the entire process.
The entire structure that supports the business is invisible to the company, giving it the security and freedom to focus its IT efforts on strategy, innovation, and delivery.
These serverless architectures refer to applications that rely heavily on third-party services — such as Backend or “BaaS” — or on custom code that runs in ephemeral containers — “FaaS” (Function as a Service) or Function-as-a- Service Platform —, where the most well-known vendor host of what is currently AWS Lambda.
What Is Your Relationship With Cloud Computing?
It is a more mature cloud computing execution model in which the provider dynamically manages machine resource allocation.
The server becomes a responsibility managed by the platform. In the services offered today, the customer is still responsible for deciding structural issues, such as renting the ideal number of servers and making constant adjustments to match supply to demand.
With serverless computing, this is yet another operational layer that no longer takes up the IT team’s time, assigning only issues relevant to the business to the routine.
This is where the maturation of technology comes into focus, having computing resources available without worrying about their implementation and maintenance, regardless of the size of the business and the moment in the market.
What Are The Functions Of Serverless Computing?
As we’ve said before, the primary function of serverless computing is to take the burden of dealing with operational issues at the back of the developers’ business. However, many other inherent qualities of cloud computing are optimized in this model.
With serverless computing, for example, it is possible to increase the productivity of all the company’s departments with a system that fits perfectly to the needs — including offering different structures for processes within the same chain.
An example of this optimization and increased productivity is in the developers’ work — the code units exposed to the outside world are more specific functions that optimize the backend software development task.
Why Invest In Serverless Computing?
We have already discussed what serverless computing is and how it works. But now it’s time to get down to business and find out how this new cloud computing model can help your business. We know that, at first, the solution is more widespread outside Brazil, but it is essential to understand the main benefits and why to invest in the service.
Reduce Costs
The big secret for cost-efficient IT is to allocate investments with return optimization — neither spending too little, creating bottlenecks in production and delivery to the customer, nor spending too much, wasting money on idle resources. Serverless computing can help you with this task, significantly reducing costs for the company.
With cloud computing, it was already possible to have this kind of flexibility in spending, but the decision to offer and forecast for the future was up to the customer. In serverless computing, this variation is up to the provider, which can precisely adjust its demand for performance.
For example, there is no charge if your code is not running. This kind of advantage eliminates the need to provision resources in advance and brings much more savings to the company.
It Is A Fully Flexible Model
It is not only in terms of costs that serverless computing guarantees flexibility to the business. This very adjustable nature of servers without the need for direct action by the client allows much greater agility than cloud computing to scale a system in a scenario of accentuated growth.
The great idea of these new cloud models is to pass the performance tuning control from individual servers to consumption units (such as the amount of storage, throughput, or memory).
And as this responsibility is not in the hands of internal IT, it can worry about putting its business plans into practice without the fear of having to deal with the allocation and adaptation of new processes within the system.
Optimization is also directly linked to FaaS cost savings. The performance optimizations that can be made in code will increase application speed and have a direct and immediate link to reduced operational costs, subject to the granularity of your vendor’s billing scheme.
Decreases The Risk Of System Threats
Removing management from within the company is also a way to reduce the security breaches to which a system is exposed on a day-to-day basis.
Good serverless computing providers have teams specialized in security that have greater control over updates, monitoring of offenders, and contingency plans that guarantee availability since the entire operation is on only one side of the system.
Also Read: Cloud Technology And Business Scalability
