Serverless
What?
an approach to software design that allows developers to build and run services without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
Developers can write and deploy code, while a cloud provider provisions servers to run their applications, databases, and storage systems at any scale.
A service that is only run when it is called
Gained popularity from AWS lambdas
Need app that can start up quickly to process a request
How
For
No server management.
Serverless computing runs on servers, but those servers are managed by cloud service providers
Save cost
With traditional server architecture, you would have to predict and purchase server capacity, usually more than you need, to ensure your application does not face any performance bottlenecks or downtime
With serverless, cloud service providers only charge you for what you use since your code will only run once triggered by an event when a backend service is needed
serverless saves a fortune in human resource costs as well. As maintance of servers are already handled in the price
Scalability.
Applications built on serverless architecture can be scaled endlessly and automatically.
Quicker time to market
Development environments are easier to set up and not having to manage servers leads to accelerated delivery and rapid deployment.
Reduced latency.
Thanks to Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and Edge Networks, serverless functions can be run on servers that are closer to end users all over the globe
Against
Vendor lock-in
the easiest way to go will be to use a single cloud services provider
Each provider will have their own way of doing things, so big changes if want to migrate
If there is an infrastructure problem of any kind, you have to wait for them to fix it.
Or you will need to have a back up server that turns on to serve traffic (ie kubernetes cluster)
Security
Cloud providers will often run code from several customers on the same server at any given time
via Multitenancy. customers are tenants that only have access to their share of the server
data could be exposed due to misconfiguration of that server.
Performance impact
When a function is called for the first time, it requires a “cold start” which is to say that a container needs to spin up before the function can be run.
container will continue to run for a period of time after the API call is complete in case it is needed again soon after at which point we get a “warm start” without the added latency.
This can reduce the number of technologies that you can use in serverless due to SLA requirements or make this a non option due to a non negotiable requirement for specific tech
Debugging and testing.
a serverless environment can be difficult to replicate in order to perform integration tests.
Links
https://blog.cyborch.com/the-case-against-serverless/
Links
https://medium.com/@AlexeyBalchunas/make-any-java-web-app-serverless-786119ffdf83
https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2019/06/build-first-serverless-function-minutes.html
https://www.exoscale.com/syslog/java-serverless-micronaut-graalvm/
https://www.datadoghq.com/knowledge-center/serverless-architecture/
https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/cloud-native-apps/what-is-serverless
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