An introduction to Serverless or FaaS technology

We have been building awesome apps since quite a long time but the bottleneck for most of them are scalability and infra to support scale.

While people talk about Blockchain and AI as the future of the technology leaders are considering Serverless Architecture or Function-as-a-service (FaaS) as for how infrastructure will be used in future.

If you read on Wikipedia

Function as a service (FaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. Building an application following this model is one way of achieving a “serverless” architecture, and is typically used when building microservices applications.

Which simply means running your application on the preconfigured and managed environment and only playing when your application executes.

There is no serverless, it’s just someone else’s fully managed execution environment that I only pay a fraction of a cost for whatever my function is run. — Someone’s shirt

The way cloud computing disrupt has changed the way we think about infrastructure is nonpareil in the same way serverless will be in the future. Most of the tech giants have already adapted serverless and they have benefitted with it.

Currently, all major cloud computing provider offers serverless architecture or Function-as-a-service.

Lamda — Amazon

Lamda is one the most popular Serverless service offered by Amazon Web Services. It lets you run your code without provisioning or managing servers, executes your code only when needed and scales automatically from few to millions of requests. You pay only for the compute time you consume — there is no charge when your code is not running.

Currently, Lamda supports NodeJS, Python, C#, Go and Java server-side languages, which almost includes all the popular programming languages.

To know more about Lamda visit Lamda docs on Amazon Web Services website.

Cloud Function — Google

Similar to Amazon’s Lamda Google have Cloud Functions enabling developers and founders to run their applications as functions. Google Function service also lets your application seamlessly integrate to other Google Cloud Services with inbuilt security.

Currently, Cloud Function by Google supports NodeJS and Python at this moment.

To know more about Cloud Functions by Google read Cloud Function docs on Google Cloud Services website.

Azure Function — Microsoft

Similar to others Microsoft’s Azure is also in the party and offers Azure Function as a Serverless or Function-as-a-service (FaaS) architecture to its Azure users.

Currently, Azure functions support .NET, Java, Python, NodeJS, Ruby and PHP.

To know more about Azure Function read Azure Function docs on Microsoft Azure website.

Similar to above other major providers like IBM, Alibaba, Rackspace, Digital Ocean and etc also offers Serverless or Function-as-a-service architecture.

read further…

Let me know your thoughts in comments.