The future of the cloud...Serverless
- by Alex Antonatos
The case for serverless is strong, so far the cloud has been someone else’s servers, servers should be treated as commodities.
Serverless means:
- Functions are the unit of deployment and scaling
- No Machines, VMs, or Containers are visible in the programming model
- Permanent storage lives elsewhere
- Scales per request. Users cannot over- or under-provision capacity never pay for idle (no cold servers/containers or their costs) Implicitly fault-tolerant because functions can run anywhere
- BYOC - Bring Your Own Code
Several Cloud vendors have this live for example AWS has Lambda(introduced in November 2014, but it started mainly this year in being more mainstream on Azure,Google, Oracle and IBM) Lambda, is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon
Lambda runs code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources required by that code and is part of the Amazon Web Services offerings.
Lambda supports Python 2.7 / 3.6, NodeJS 4.3 / 6.10 / 8.10, C# (.NET Core 1.0.1 / 2.0), Java 8
As of end of 2018, Serverless is being embraced by major cloud players and this is being promoted promoting functions , if this takes off the biggest drawback will be Vender Control and Lock-IN, but the benefits are event-based, stateless, and transient, infinite scalable(in theory) and lots of bang for your buck
Below is an example of a client that demonstrates the tremendous savings a pay as you go serverless model can help an organization.
Any comments , or any implementation experience of serverless that you would like to share , do not hesitate.