What is Serverless computing? How is it useful for developers?

Technology is changing at breakneck speed. New concepts are coming in and old concepts are transforming. As a result, there is a lot of shift in the way people work with these technological advancements. And there is one technology that every developer should look is serverless computing. It is a buzz now, all Information technology firms are looking to cram into their organizations. Because it offers plenty of advantages that clearly bring a new set of opportunities.

Serverless will fundamentally change how we build a business around technology and how you code – Simon Wardley

What is Serverless computing?

Everyone thinks the term ‘Serverless’ means not having servers, but it is not like that. The serverless computing means that everyone can build and run application and services without thinking about servers and its implementation and management. So, it is clear that serverless computing has servers but users and developers are unaware of it.

With this fascinating technology, you can build and maintain any type of application and scale it with high availability. Whereas, Serverless computing is implemented on the Serverless architectures which are provided by different vendors such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, OpenWhisk, etc.

Also Read: 3 Top Tech Skills in High Demand That Can Change the Future

How Serverless architecture works?

Serverless architecture mainly consists of applications that depend on the services provided by vendors. There are two different serverless services used by vendors:

1.Back-end as a service

Back-end as a service is the cloud computing model works that provide developers to connect web and mobile applications to cloud via Application Programming Interface. This acts as a middleware connect between the front-end to cloud back-end. Here developers don’t require to think about back-end, because it is served as service by the provider.

2.Functions as a service

Building an application using this model is one way of achieving a serverless architecture that is mainly used when building microservice applications. Here developers only depend on a block of code or business logic that is executed when it is required. This service totally avoids the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure. This service also costs as ‘Pay-as-you-go’.

Why Serverless computing?

The prior technology offers many drawbacks compared to the new serverless technology.

• The applications were written and run on servers that are fixed resources, due to this it cannot handle the on-demand traffic when the requests heavily poured in.
• Most of the time CPU remains idle because the server is busy with networking and I/O requests.

Serverless Computing vendors

AWS Lambda, introduced by Amazon in 2014, was the first public cloud vendor with an abstract serverless computing offering. AWS Lambda initially supported only Node.js. It now supports Python, Java, C# and Go, and code written in other languages can be invoked indirectly via Node.js.

Google Cloud Platform offers Google Cloud Functions, which supports Node.js by now.

IBM has published OpenWhisk as an open source serverless platform. OpenWhisk includes native support for Node.js, Python, Java, and Swift, and supports other languages and runtime via Docker containers.

Microsoft Azure offers Azure Functions, which is offered both in the Azure public cloud or on-premises via Azure Stack.

How developers benefit from serverless computing?

Developers can choose freedom with the serverless computing, it has a lot of benefits for coders and programmers. They can build an application without worrying about the infrastructure of the platforms. Developers can focus on their core product and spent time on producing better quality products. They can absolutely avoid worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes on cloud or on-premises. It is the duty of the providers to automate the infrastructure tasks from the context of the developers.