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Introduction to Serverless Computing

An organization’s conventional approach to creating an IT environment/infrastructure by getting hardware and software resources individually has become outdated. With the advent and there are now a variety of ways to virtualize IT systems and access required applications over the Internet through web-based applications.

Cloud computing is all the rage today and with many competitive cloud service providers in the market, there are a lot of queries on which one to choose. Before diving deep into understanding Serverless Compute, refresh your memory with some cloud concepts.

Introduction to Serverless Computing:

Serverless computing is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider handles the functioning/operations of virtual machines as needed to fulfil requests, which are billed by an abstract calculation of the resources required to satisfy the request rather than per virtual machine, per hour. Despite the term, it does not involve the execution of code without the use of servers. The name “serverless computing” comes from the fact that the owner of the system does not have to buy, rent, or provision servers or virtual machines on which the back-end code runs.

Why Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing can be more cost-effective than renting or buying a fixed number of servers, which also results in large periods of underuse or idle time.

In addition, a serverless architecture means that developers and operators do not need to spend time setting up and tuning autoscaling policies or systems; the cloud provider is responsible for scaling the capacity to the demand.

As the modern cloud-native architecture inherently scales down as well as up, these systems are known as elastic rather than scalable.

The units of code revealed to the outside world with function-as-a-service are basic event-driven functions. This eliminates the need for the programmer to think about multithreading or explicitly handling HTTP requests in their code, simplifying the task of back-end software development.

Top Serverless Computing Tools:

1. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda was the first serverless computing tool introduced in 2014 popularly known as Function-as-a-Service or FaaS.

Benefits:

How it works:

AWS Lambda

Image Source: docs.amazon.com

2. Azure Functions: 

Benefits:

Here is a step-by-step guide for creating an Azure Function. 

3. Google Functions: 

Benefits:

There are various parameters to consider before making the right choice. It depends on the requirement, IT environments, problems to be solved, cost, etc. Let us look at a real-life case study to understand the implementation of serverless computing tools.

Case Study: Architecting Serverless Web Application on AWS

A client of CloudThat wanted to design and architect a solution for creating a web application that is going to be used as a platform to conduct online exams. These exams can either be on-demand where a candidate can visit the website anytime and take the exam or the exam starts at a specific date & time where thousands of candidates will attempt the exam simultaneously. The solution must be deployed on AWS and should be able to handle large variation in traffic with minimum cost. Read more about the case study here. 

Go through the Expert Advisory page and Managed Services Package that is CloudThat’s offerings. You can easily get in touch with our highly accomplished team of experts to carry out any of your cloud requirements. CloudThat is Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and a Google Cloud Partner and has successfully led many successful projects for our esteemed clients. To know more about serverless computing feel free to Contact Us.

If you have any queries regarding serverless compute, drop a comment in the below section and our team will respond quickly.

WRITTEN BY Daneshwari Mathapati

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Comments

  1. Shabana R

    May 21, 2021

    Reply

    very informative

  2. Munwar

    May 6, 2021

    Reply

    It’s intresting and informative. Thanks for sharing the blog

  3. Anusha

    May 5, 2021

    Reply

    Very useful blog. Thanks for sharing

  4. Click to Comment

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