Serverless Architecture: Everything You Should Know

Gone are those days when the developers were confused with building mobile apps and web applications while taking care of all aspects, including server management, provisioning and scaling. The development of next-gen cloud-native development architectures like the serverless model has offered a multitude of advantages to businesses over conventional cloud-based or server-based models.

While this architecture has offered greater scalability and flexibility to businesses,  other benefits like promptness and cost-efficiency have attracted people to go ‘serverless’. With the implementation of this model, you need not think about buying, managing, and provisioning backend servers. Instead, you can use the magical features of serverless architecture—think how!

Let’s take a closer look at it.

Serverless uses the existing managed services accessible via the public cloud. This is not just a way to host an application; instead, it acts as a crucial part of the application and replaces the need for a manual infrastructure configuration. Contrary to what the term “server-less” means, as you think, servers exist with serverless technology.

Through serverless development, the developers can develop, deploy and run the application without needing to manage servers. Following the deployment, a serverless application faces the traffic and scales up or down based on it automatically. 

In the earlier age of computing, the flow and development of products were highly defined by the hardware. However, with the introduction of SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud technology, the software development phase changed.

Later, the advent of containerised architecture packed the software and its dependencies into containers, which are remote units that run independently. This was still costly, impossible to scale, and had high maintenance procedures.

Serverless resolved these problems and brought a new solution to enable ease of development, saving time and money, making it one of the most in-demand architectures. By 2035, the serverless architecture market is expected to cross the figure of USD 193.42 billion with a CAGR of 25.70% over the forecast period of 2023-2035.

The name serverless architecture revolves around the concept of building and running applications or services without the necessity of managing the infrastructure. ‘Serverless’ is not exactly what the name defines; it still has servers involved; the only thing is that the developers no longer need to be concerned with them.

The cloud provider takes care of managing the server space and dynamically allocating the resources as and when required. Developing the serverless application takes many forms, for example, with well-known frameworks such as ReactJS for the client side, SpringBoot on the server side and MongoDB as the database. You can deploy them on a cloud-managed or an on-premise infrastructure. 

Servers let users communicate using an application and gain access to the business logic; however, server management takes much time and resources.

Nevertheless, maintaining the server hardware, taking care of the security updates and software and creating backups during failure are things the team should consider. Through a serverless architecture, developers can assign these responsibilities to a third-party provider, which helps them focus on writing application code.

Serverless architecture has been here for over a decade, and the first mainstream FaaS model by Amazon, known as AWS Lambda, was launched in 2014. Many developers currently use AWS Lambda to develop serverless applications; however, Google and Microsoft use their own FaaS models, like Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions, respectively.

Let’s explore the working process of a serverless model:

1. The developer creates an application that incorporates a function that tells how it responds to a specific user action. Particularly, cloud providers provide pre-packaged FaaS products that let developers make coding easier and bring in the pre-built backend capabilities.
2. An ‘event’ defines and specifies how and then the triggering of a function occurs. For instance, while the user initiates the HTTP request, the application should fetch and deliver particular data. This “if-then” process is termed an event.
3. Once the application gets deployed and becomes accessible to the user, the event gets triggered with a user action.
4. The application passes on the event to the cloud provider, and the provider allocates resources dynamically as required to respond to the action based on the predefined function. 
5. The user receives data or any result that the function defines.

When a user request is not made, zero resources will be allocated, and there is no information stored in an intermediary state. This makes sure that only recently updated data reaches the users, which minimises the storage costs.

With the help of a serverless architecture, the developers can focus on the core product rather than being confused about operating servers or managing the run times, both in the cloud or on-premise architecture. The reduction in overhead helps developers reclaim the time and energy that can be used to build amazing products that are both scalable and reliable.

Here are some common use cases of serverless architecture:

• Running the scheduled tasks, including business logic, daily reports and backups
• Integration with third-party services and APIs
• Developing REST APIs for mobile and web applications
• Asynchronous Processing techniques like video transcoding
• Real-time processing of structured and unstructured data
• Automating CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) pipelines
• IT process automation like performing compliance security checks, eliminating access automatically or sending across approvals

Functions as a Service is a prime element of serverless computing. It provides a platform for developers to perform code execution without managing the core infrastructure. This service makes the process easier through the management of resources, servers and scaling, particularly a major aspect of app development.

In a serverless framework, FaaS helps developers emphasise writing the business logic for their specific applications. With the help of a cloud provider, you can manage the server infrastructure, auto resource allocation and scaling up/down as required. Through FaaS, the execution of serverless functions is cloud-based, making it efficient with a simple application code upload.

PaaS, or Platform as a Service, offers the same advantages as Serverless (sometimes termed as FaaS). They eliminate the need to manage server hardware and software. The key difference is the way you create and deploy the application, as well as the scalability of the application.

PaaS helps you deploy the application as a single unit, and it is developed conventionally with the help of a certain kind of web framework such as ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, and so on. In this method, the entire application level undergoes only the process of scaling. You can run multiple instances of the application if you wish to manage the additional load. 

FaaS helps you compose the application to separate autonomous functions. Every function is hosted with a FaaS provider and could be scaled automatically based on the increase or decrease in the function call. This is a cost-efficient method of paying to compute the resources. Instead of paying to have the application always live or waiting for requests in many instances, you can pay for the number of times the functions are called. 

Serverless architecture is changing the phase of software development, helping startups with a way to enhance innovation and efficiency. By eliminating the necessity to manage servers, serverless computing lets companies focus on the development of serverless apps and backend code without the complexity of taking care of the server hardware. 

Serverless security is a key concern for organisations that start to roll serverless into production. Conventional security tools are not effective in a serverless ecosystem as they are focused on securing static applications or protecting servers. Let’s check the best practices to improve serverless security:
 

Though serverless architecture is not an encapsulated solution, it fixes scenarios in which the conventional infrastructure may fail. Here are some use cases for the serverless model:

• Web and Mobile Backend: It excels at triggering the backend of mobile and web applications through processing APIs, managing database events, managing user authentications, sharing notifications, etc. It lets developers build and scale the backend solutions without directly managing the servers or provisioning them. 
   
• Stream Processing: Streaming data is no longer a burden and the challenge of managing the underlying infrastructure will be resolved. Through this capability, you can let the applications that depend on data processing and analytics respond in real-time to the data streams. 
   
• Microservices: By allowing complex services to be segmented into separate functions, the serverless architecture supports microservices. Every function could scale independently, which provides efficiency and flexibility in resource utilisation and maintenance. 
   
• ETL Jobs: Serverless computing revolutionises the way ETL pipelines are constructed. ETL or Extract, Transform, Load, works as the functions that are triggered at particular intervals. This eliminates the necessity of dedicated servers to continuously execute these processes. 
   
• Event-driven Processing: It is ideally suitable for event processing, running code in response to different triggers like monitoring signals, file uploads, and REST API calls. This feature enables applications to be responsive to system or user events.

When a specific serverless function is not called in a while, the provider usually closes the function to prevent over-provisioning and to save energy. Subsequently, when a user runs the application that calls the function, the provider will need to spin it up from scratch and host the function again. Thus, the startup time increases the latency, and this phenomenon is called a ‘cold start’.

After the function gets up, it begins running rapidly on the subsequent requests, i.e., the warm start. However, if the function doesn’t get requested again for a while, it again goes dormant. This means that the next user who requests this function will again move to the dormant stage. Cold starts were considered a pivotal trade-off for utilising serverless functions until a short while ago.

• Hybrid serverless models with multi-cloud environments can expand adoption to a great extent. With this revolution, we can expect serverless to be more mainstream in enterprise apps.
   
• As more organisations go serverless, you can see a more pressing need to revolve around the unique challenges serverless apps pose and the relevant measures to improve serverless app security.
   
• Both serverless platforms and application management techniques are going to take a surge, thereby simplifying the observability and monitoring of the serverless models. 
   
• More and more enterprises are involved in the adoption of serverless for performing critical operations like data processing and specific web applications. This trend would reflect more in areas like media, IoT, and entertainment applications. 
   

Like any emerging technology, serverless technology is travelling along its gain-and-pain phase, which causes rapid dynamicity in the marketplace. We hope the above article has given you ample points to consider when dealing with serverless architecture and analysing how it would be advantageous to your business.

There are significant positive aspects of this architecture, which involve reduced development and operational costs, reduced environmental impact and ease of operations management.  

While the challenges of the serverless framework are eventually cleared up and advancements take place, the countless benefits of using this innovation are going to be a turning point that enables enterprises and businesses alike to push its possibilities into the mainstream.