What Is Serverless Architecture and How Does It Work?

Continuous software development, integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring are all part of the DevOps lifecycle, and catering to customers’ varying preferences is essential for your company’s success. However, in order to keep up with the increasing needs, it takes a lot of work to constantly provide and fix servers. Since you don’t have to worry about setting up the underlying hardware, serverless dramatically decreases your operating costs. 

The term “serverless architecture” refers to a type of software architecture in which the hosting of applications is delegated to an external cloud provider. The term “serverless” is sometimes misunderstood to mean that no servers are used at all, but rather that the cloud service provider handles all server management on your behalf. Therefore, the servers are hidden from view all through the SDLC. 

How does Serverless Architecture work?

The foundation of serverless architecture is the FaaS concept, which allows for code execution on cloud platforms without the need for fully supplied infrastructure instances. Stateless, scalable, and fully managed by cloud service providers, Functions as a Service (FaaS) is another name for Compute as a Service (CaaS). 

The DevOps team creates programs with an emphasis on business logic and defines an event, such as an HTTP request, that will cause the program’s functionality to be performed. The cloud service provider then runs the code and returns the output to the web application. 

Some of the most popular serverless services offered by cloud providers include Microsoft Azure functions, Google Cloud Functions, IBM OpenWhisk, and AWS Lambda. 

Serverless architecture is highly desirable for business stakeholders and DevOps teams due to the time and money savings associated with on-demand auto-scaling resources and pay-as-you-go services. Let’s learn how serverless architecture works by looking at how it is used by AWS. 

Components of Serverless Architecture

The “service layer” of traditional multi-tiered systems is being replaced by external serverless services and APIs. The Internet has made it simpler for developers to forego building the back-end functionality by themselves and instead rely on cloud services, which already exist and are exposed via well-defined interfaces to the rest of the application. 

Companies that used to rely on proprietary interfaces now have incentives to adopt open standards, as doing so allows for programs to be built atop uniform application programming interfaces (APIs) for standard functionality. APIs enable apps to do a wide variety of tasks, such as sending emails, updating calendars, storing information, processing information, sharing information, and more. Developers are increasingly able to depend on the work of their predecessors rather than having to create everything from scratch. 

Function-as-a-service (FaaS) 

FaaS, or “Functions as a Service,” is an often discussed part of serverless architecture; it’s slightly different than using APIs but still offers many of the same benefits. FaaS services allow the developer to tie together “little,” highly-focused chunks of code to achieve broader goals, whereas utilizing an API often entails nothing more than a web service call or basic HTTP request. 

Nowadays’ FaaS services are, essentially, the updated version of the traditional shell scripts and batch files. In a traditional server setup, a cron job could initiate a shell script that retrieves a file via the FTP protocol, then processes the file’s contents using a pipeline of command-line tools to do any necessary data manipulation before delivering the results to their intended recipient. Instead, comparable operations may now be triggered by web-based triggers, which can then run AWS Lambda functions or Azure Automation processes written in a variety of languages. 

As a result, utilizing FaaS products is typically more involved than utilizing basic API requests; nevertheless, FaaS offers greater customisation by allowing developers to write the code that is executed. Without having to think about the servers they are running or anything else that could be happening in the background, developers are free to concentrate on constructing the various components and linking them. 

APIs 

The “Data API” is another part of serverless architectures that applies the FaaS model to data. Since the advent of computing, most programs have required access to a database server or servers in order to store and change operational data. Developers no longer have to worry about purchasing, installing, and maintaining server infrastructure thanks to modern API management services like Fauna. For serverless Data APIs, the onus of maintaining the requisite server infrastructure falls on the API’s supplying company. The developer of an application need just supply authentication information and a connection point in order to have access to the Data API and will only be charged for the resources actually used. Therefore, “Data APIs” can help you save a lot of money on resources like programming and operations workers. 

What are the advantages of using serverless architecture?

One major benefit is that your team may put all of their efforts towards creating new products. They are released from the responsibility of running and maintaining servers. The vendor, rather than your staff, takes care of aspects like network configuration and physical server security. 

It’s important to note that serverless architecture has several more advantages. 

The process of decomposing results in increased transparency. 

It is common practice to “decompose” apps while using serverless architecture. Improved application-wide visibility is one result of these changes. 

The information required to implement modifications or design workarounds decreases as the size of the parts decreases. 

Event-driven serverless computing. 

Instead than relying on a stream-based approach, serverless computing employs events. The components of an application are decoupled from one another in an event-based design. Cause and effect are intertwined in this world. Connectivity to each service is built into the stream-based model. If an error occurs, it will just affect that one event and not the whole log. 

Reduced deployment times, more adaptability, and quicker innovation 

One of the main draws of the serverless architecture is its speed. Apps may be ready for usage in a matter of hours instead of days because there is no need for costly infrastructure builds. Rapid deployments not only save time, but also make scaling a breeze. 

Using an agile design allows for highly adaptable product releases. Innovation can be sped up because of the streamlined procedure. 

This adaptability is of fundamental importance in times of rapid course correction. These kinds of situations are occurring all around the world as a result of the epidemic. In order to adapt to these new demands, businesses must shift their priorities. This may occur within the organization, when people begin working from home. Retailers’ and eateries’ use of customer-facing apps is just another instance of this trend. 

Budget-Friendly Building Design 

By using a serverless architecture, a company is effectively outsourcing its server and database administration needs. You no longer need to make the substantial financial commitments needed for managing internal architecture. The amount you can save depends on your use scenario. 

Prioritizing the User Experience 

Users are expecting increasingly sophisticated digital experiences from the programs they use. There will be more time for improving the user experience if the architecture isn’t a problem (UX). Putting off spending on the user interface is a bad idea; fortunately, serverless computing allows you to refocus those funds elsewhere. 

What are the limitations of using serverless architecture?

There are flaws with serverless design. Some users are hesitant to switch over because the architecture is currently in development. 

Chronic inefficiency in application use 

Workloads that take a long time to complete could be more expensive to perform on a serverless platform. Most of the time, a dedicated server is the best option. 

Reliance on Outside Parties 

Because of the nature of serverless architecture, you must rely on the services of your service provider. You aren’t completely in charge, and unexpected shifts might affect you. In accordance with the conditions of the platform, you may use it. 

Cold Start

When a system needs to turn on all of its components from scratch, it is said to be “cold starting.” It might take some time for your serverless architecture to process the first function call. The need for the function to “cold start” again is avoided if it is kept in a “warm” condition. To do this, you will need to periodically send it inquiries.

Applications of Serverless Architecture

Web applications with changeable load are among the many sorts of programs that can benefit from a serverless design. It’s one thing to design for a workplace intranet, where the number of users is guaranteed to be in the tens or hundreds, if not thousands. However, things change drastically once you hit the open Internet and see a spike from tens to hundreds of thousands to millions of people in a matter of minutes. 

In a system with a more conventional layout, striking a balance between objectives such as reducing expenses and increasing throughput can be a monumental challenge. To avoid frustrating your clients to the point that they go elsewhere to do business, you need a solid foundation of hardware and software. Even if you manage to hit the sweet spot where everyone has access to sufficient hardware, you’re still losing money unnecessarily when users aren’t logged in.

These issues may be avoided by adopting a serverless architecture when developing a web application. Building globally dispersed, dynamically expandable systems with only the cost of the actual computer resources needed is now possible thanks to cloud hosting and the integration of numerous services. It’s a perfect example of a use case where everyone wins: when people go offline, you save money and you don’t have to worry about infrastructure or growing. 

Another sort of software that finds a natural home in serverless architecture is microservices. In recent years, the prevalence of microservice architectures has expanded with the complexity of software. This is due to the fact that more complicated software necessitates more people on a team, more stringent release deadlines, and more extensive development scopes and timeframes. The difficulties of software development, and the size of the teams required to complete them, grow in a geometric rather than linear fashion.

The smoothing of these curves can be aided by the decomposition of monolithic apps into many microservices. That’s why microservices have become such an emblem of serverless design. 

They are designed to provide value to the company through a collection of narrowly-targeted APIs; shifting to a serverless architecture only offloads the hosting responsibilities. In the same vein as before, the serverless architecture enables microservices to safely access, alter, and integrate data from numerous sources in real time, allowing developers to focus on the front end of their applications rather than the back end infrastructure. 

Event-driven systems are the third category of software that can greatly profit from a serverless design. To guarantee the right actions are done in response to critical events, event-driven systems often include agents (also known as “emitters”), consumers (“sinks”), and channels. Agents can range from humans delivering text messages to “dumb” IoT devices reporting back to headquarters with telemetry data.

The agent/emitter creates the event, which is then sent down the appropriate channels to the appropriate consumer/sink for processing. This design paradigm avoids some of the geometric complexity we discussed before while still allowing for an unlimited number of new agents, channels, and consumers to be added. 

Case Studies in Serverless Architecture 

Short-lived jobs and workloads with irregular or unpredictably high traffic are ideal candidates for serverless architecture. The most common applications of serverless technology are: 

Trigger-based tasks

Serverless computing is well-suited to any scenario in which a user action causes an event or chain of events to occur. A person registering on your site, for instance, may cause a change in the database, which may cause a welcome email to be sent. The back-end processing may be taken care of by a series of serverless functions. 

Integration of RESTful APIs 

Amazon API Gateway may be used in conjunction with serverless functions to provide scalable RESTful APIs. 

Procedural asynchronicity 

Tasks like generating product information or transcoding movies after upload may be handled by serverless functions without disrupting the flow of the application or introducing user-facing delay. 

Security checks

A function can be called whenever a new container is created to check it for security flaws or improper settings. SSH authentication and two-factor authentication may be made more robust by making use of functions. 

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)

Many parts of your CI/CD processes can be automated with a serverless design. Automated testing may be triggered in response to a number of events, including code contributions, pull requests, and more. 

The majority of developers that switch to serverless do so gradually, migrating only some sections of their applications to serverless while still using traditional servers for other functions. You can always add new features to a serverless architecture if the need arises. 

Summary 

Despite its many benefits, serverless architecture has a number of drawbacks. Because business needs are crucial to the viability and success of designs, which cannot be based exclusively on technological factors. Likewise, Serverless has its moments of glory when utilized well. 

Check out the wonder that is Serverless; now is the time to have a look at how Serverless really works on the inside.