Going serverless is turning into a big trend this past year. Thanks to the nature of cloud computing, you no longer have to maintain your own physical servers or even settle for an always-on cloud computing service. Today, it’s possible for small businesses to set up a mix of cloud and on-premise as well as public; private; and hybrid architecture to be more efficient using on-demand serverless services.
Going down the serverless route comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. The boost in efficiency is certainly a huge plus, but you also have other factors to consider before finalizing your decision to go completely serverless. Let’s take a closer look at the advantages and weigh them against the challenges of going serverless.
Serverless computing sees code or microservices as an entity to be executed once per call or request. It is completely hardware-agnostic; in fact, it is environment-agnostic. You don’t have a dedicated cloud environment to maintain.
The same set of environments is used by multiple code or services. You are basically ‘borrowing’ someone else’s computer to execute your microservices. Pay a small fee for every execution and you can completely forget about the complex tasks associated with infrastructure maintenance.
Another benefit you can gain from the nature of the serverless approach is improved cost-efficiency. With traditional cloud computing, you pay for the allocated resources whether you use them or not. Yes, the costs of cloud services are calculated hourly, but the previous statement is still true in most circumstances.
That is not the case with Serverless computing. You basically pay for every execution of your code or services, but you get to spend $0 when you are not using any computing power. You will be able to reduce your server costs by a substantial margin.
There is even a minimum cap, so you can use computing power without spending a dime when you don’t exceed the minimum amount. Be sure to consult the serverless computing service provider for details about the minimum cap.
Higher scalability is, without question, one of the biggest advantages of serverless computing. You are no longer limited by the boundaries of a cloud computing cluster. You also have a larger network of servers and computing powers to utilize.
No matter how complex the execution is, a capable serverless environment can scale your app or service up infinitely. In fact, the entire process of scaling up your app or service can be fully automated. After all, you only need to worry about the small cost of executing your code.
That last part about automation is important to understand. Scaling up in a serverless environment doesn’t involve creating a new partition or making changes to the ecosystem. It is fully automated from start to finish.
