Serverless Architectures
Serverless architectures are application designs that incorporate third-party “Backend as a Service” (BaaS) services, and/or that include custom code run in managed, ephemeral containers on a “Functions as a Service” (FaaS) platform. By using these ideas, and related ones like single-page applications, such architectures remove much of the need for a traditional always-on server component. Serverless architectures may benefit from significantly reduced operational cost, complexity, and engineering lead time, at a cost of increased reliance on vendor dependencies and comparatively immature supporting services.
What is Serverless?
Like many trends in software, there’s no one clear view of what Serverless is. For starters, it encompasses two different but overlapping areas:
- Serverless was first used to describe applications that significantly or fully incorporate third-party, cloud-hosted applications and services, to manage server-side logic and state. These are typically “rich client” applications—think single-page web apps, or mobile apps—that use the vast ecosystem of cloud-accessible databases (e.g., Parse, Firebase), authentication services (e.g., Auth0, AWS Cognito), and so on. These types of services have been previously described as “(Mobile) Backend as a Service“, and I use “BaaS” as shorthand in the rest of this article.
- Serverless can also mean applications where server-side logic is still written by the application developer, but, unlike traditional architectures, it’s run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one invocation), and fully managed by a third party. One way to think of this is “Functions as a Service” or “FaaS”. (Note: The original source for this name—a tweet by @marak—is no longer publicly available.) AWS Lambda is one of the most popular implementations of a Functions-as-a-Service platform at present, but there are many others, too.
More information: https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html