Overview of Serverless and its Features

What is Serverless?

Serverless is a way to describe the services, practices, and strategies that enable you to build more agile applications so you can innovate and respond to change faster. With serverless computing, infrastructure management tasks like capacity provisioning and patching are handled by Cloud providers, so you can focus on only writing code that serves your customers. Serverless services like AWS Lambda come with automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-value billing model. Lambda is an event-driven compute service that enables you to run code in response to events from over 150 natively integrated AWS and SaaS sources – all without managing any servers.

In understanding the definition of serverless computing, it’s important to note that servers are still running the code. The serverless name comes from the fact that the tasks associated with infrastructure provisioning and management are invisible to the developer. This approach enables developers to increase their focus on the business logic and deliver more value to the core of the business. Serverless computing helps teams increase their productivity and bring products to market faster, and it allows organizations to better optimize resources and stay focused on innovation.

Why use Serverless?

A serverless approach will allow you to minimize undifferentiated work around managing servers, infrastructure, and the parts of the application that add less value to your customers. Serverless can make it easier to deliver new features in applications, launch experiments, and improve your team delivery velocity, while also providing a pay-for-value cost model.

  • Move from idea to market, faster
  • Adapt at scale
  • Lower your costs
  • Build better applications, easier
  • More efficient use of resources

Below is the comparison of AWS, GCP, and Azure Serverless offerings. Please note, the information from the Cloud providers and the sources of information keeps changing on a day-to-day basis as the services advance.

FeaturesAWS LambdaGoogle CloudAzure Functions
Scalability and AvailabilityAutomatic scaling (transparently)Automatic scalingManual or metered scaling (App Service Plan), or sub-second automatic scaling (Consumption Plan)
Max # of FunctionsUnlimited functions1000 functions per projectUnlimited functions
Concurrent Executions1000 parallel executions per account, per region (soft limit)No limitNo limit
Max Execution300 sec (5 min)540 seconds (9 minutes)300 sec (5 min)
Supported LanguagesJavaScript, Java, C#, and PythonOnly JavaScriptC#, JavaScript, F#, Python, Batch, PHP, PowerShell
DependenciesDeployment Packagesnpm package.jsonNpm, NuGet
DeploymentsOnly ZIP upload (to Lambda or S3)ZIP upload, Cloud Storage or Cloud Source RepositoriesVisual Studio Team Services, OneDrive, Local Git repository, GitHub, Bitbucket, Dropbox, External repository
Environment VariablesYesNot yetApp Settings and ConnectionStrings from App Services
VersioningVersions and aliasesCloud Source branch/tagCloud Source branch/tag
Event-drivenS3, SNS, SES, DynamoDB, Kinesis, CloudWatch, Cognito, API Gateway, CodeCommit, etc.Cloud Pub/Sub or Cloud Storage Object Change NotificationsBlob, EventHub, Generic WebHook, GitHub WebHook, Queue, Http, ServiceBus Queue, Service Bus Topic, Timer triggers
HTTP(S) InvocationAPI GatewayHTTP triggerHTTP trigger
OrchestrationAWS Step FunctionsNot yetAzure Logic Apps
LoggingCloudWatch LogsStackdriver LoggingApp Services monitoring
MonitoringCloudWatch & X-RayStackdriver MonitoringApplication Insights
In-browser Code EditorYesOnly with Cloud Source RepositoriesFunctions environment, App Service editor
Granular IAMIAM rolesNot yetIAM roles
Pricing1M requests for free, then $0.20/1M invocations, plus $0.00001667/GB-sec1M requests for free, then $0.40/1M invocations, plus $0.00000231/GB-sec1 million requests for free, then $0.20/1M invocations, plus $0.000016/GB

To know more about Miracle’s expertise around Serverless, please visit the below link.

www.miraclesoft.com/campaign/dt/caas-adoption

About the author

Sravan Akapelly

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