From the growth of traditional cloud computing, a rising trend has emerged – serverless computing. This innovative approach to computing eliminates the need for managing physical servers and allows businesses to focus on building and deploying applications without worrying about infrastructure.
The serverless computing market is anticipated to witness substantial growth, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.17% by the year 2028.
As part of the evolution of cloud computing, serverless brings many benefits, especially when it comes to development. Ideally, developers would prefer to use a single platform where they can code and release without the need to worry about activities, applications, workloads or embedded maintenance to launch new applications. Serverless offers the promise of providing these frameworks to developers.
A platform that is running on the edge, on-premises or utilizing hyperscaler resources can provide a container-based architecture that enables on-demand assets in a pay-as-you-go model. This optimizes the associated costs of running workloads coming from the applications.
This cost-effective model can provide advantages, such as:
- Reduction of the release cycle of the applications, allowing developers to focus on the coding and not on the operation of the underlying infrastructure needed to support the processing workload
- Flexible consumption and payment models for the computing resources
- Energy and sustainability enhancements because you have optimized the activities, applications or workloads
- Enhanced security applied to the containers running the applications
- Faster release cycle that embraces collaboration from multiple developers accessing common platforms
- Proliferation of platform as a service (PaaS) solutions with the necessary complex resources and applications to run functions and workloads
- Development of cloud-native applications due to the access to complex computing resources and the democratization of advanced technology
- Faster response to needs during peak shopping seasons, such as heavy traffic during Black Friday
- Event-driven scalability of resources based on schedules, batch processes or atypical growth of on-demand resources.
Among the challenges, companies should be mindful of vendor and technology dependencies, especially when containerizing applications. Over reliance on specific vendors or technologies can lead to issues such as increased IT licensing and support costs.
"Cold starts" in applications can occur due to sporadic access to code functions, affecting response times and potentially causing timeouts. To mitigate cold start issues, companies can employ techniques like enabling robots to access functions and optimizing routines, as well as considering initial response times as part of overall performance metrics. This is particularly crucial for applications that need to maintain continuous status synchronization.
The ability to use multiple languages and frameworks is also important, especially in a PaaS environment. Developers can choose languages based on their skills, project needs and timelines. Essentially, both traditional and serverless models serve distinct roles within cloud services, with the selection between them contingent upon the unique requirements and contexts of the application and organization.
It allows developers to focus exclusively on code instead of infrastructure. As companies continue to embrace this innovative approach, they can unlock new possibilities and drive growth by focusing on their core business objectives. With enhanced performance, better scalability and lower costs, serverless computing represents an additional asset in the cloud computing toolkit, augmenting rather than entirely supplanting traditional cloud computing.
