Automate the backend infrastructure, and forget the hassle of managing & maintaining servers. Choose serverless architecture to streamline software development.

What is Serverless computing?

Overview

The advantages of serverless are real. Let’s say your business software is growing at a high pace and you find a platform that takes the responsibility of managing, maintaining, and scaling up your software’s server resources. It would be an awesome scenario where you will find yourself relaxed from managing the backend and focusing on further application developments. The organizations involved in Rapid Application Development(RAD) tend to opt for serverless architecture. Therefore, we will go to find an answer to what is serverless computing and also will try to cover its other aspects. By the end of this blog post, you will have a strong understanding of serverless architecture, its use cases, and its perks.

The following sections will be discussed in this guide:

What is serverless computing?

Serverless computing/architecture is a method for developers to build enterprise-level software. In this method, developers need not be involved in managing and installing backend resources rather they just stay concentrated on building application business logic. So, any cloud service provider performs backend resource management and maintenance. As per this model, you pay against those services and the payment depends on the usage. This approach is easily adaptable and is gaining popularity among developers.

Serverless architecture

In fact, there are rapid developments have been observed in software development tools and techniques. You can leverage the rich scaffolding option which speeds up the development processes. Therefore, various cloud service providers have come up with a serverless architecture that further gives liberty to developers regarding server management. In addition, developers give the utmost attention to writing the business logic of the application and writing the backend routes to map the requests to the serverless platform.

Serverless vs Containers and Kubernetes

A container is an instance of the Docker’s image that runs the application. Containerization of any application reduces the app deployment overhead. However, containerized application runs on any platform in a uniform way and you can move the containers to any other platform without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Serverless architecture and containerization offer some similar provisions to the developers. Both of the environments minus the hassle of app deployment. Further, these ecosystems are considered better than virtual machines(VMs). In addition, resource scaling is done on the basis of usage in serverless whereas you have to manually scale the server resources in the containerization.

Let’s talk about Kubernetes which is open-source software that automates container management and deployments. In many scenarios, containers run serverless applications but Kubernetes doesn’t directly deal with the containers running serverless apps. However, there are extensions that integrate Kubernetes with the cloud service providers and handle scaling, network routing, and more.

Serverless use-cases

There are various scenarios where opting for serverless makes development and deployments easy. Some prominent use cases are as follows:

Developing APIs: Serverless architecture is the top priority of developers when it comes to building a RESTful API for your business software. Developers just focus on building API routes and the rest belongs to the service provider.

Building multilingual software: Programming language selection is a critical step In software development. However, serverless architecture provides an environment in which you can go with any language to start development.

Event-Based Tasks: Developers can write serverless functions to handle event-based actions. For example, uploading a user’s photo may trigger an event such as updating the user’s database. So, all that can be handled well by the service provider in a serverless infrastructure.

Cloud-Based Apps: You need to go with serverless architecture if you are building scalable cloud-based web apps. Moreover, serverless environments make development smooth, timely and cost-effective in terms of man hours and deployment.

Heavyweight Background Processes: Serverless infrastructure is the best option for this use case. The software whose backend is responsible for handling CPU extensive tasks is the right candidate for this architecture. In addition, you just take care of the core development tasks and stop worrying about the server maintenance and scaling jobs.

Business benefits of Serverless Computing

In this section, we will talk about the following core advantages attached to this serverless computing:

Hassle-Free Deployment: Software deployment is a proper job. Therefore, serverless architecture offers robust app deployments that take just minutes or hours.

Development Efficiency: Since backend maintenance and management are done by the cloud service provider developers fully utilize their time in software development.

Auto-Scale: Whenever, there is a need to scale up the server, it is done by the cloud service provider. Again relief for the devs.

Cost-Effective: Serverless architecture is cost-effective as you only pay for what and when you use it. Your financial bill depends on the time duration when you are functions are running.

Conclusion

That’s it for this blog post. We have gone through what is serverless computing and how it leverages the tech world. In addition, we explored serverless use cases and the benefits of serverless computing and we also touched on serverless vs containers. This blog post will really help you if you are willing to opt for serverless architecture.

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