In software engineering, carrying out a personal project could be a relatively straightforward task. You engage your programming skills and your mathematical expertise in building the best product you could come up with to solve the problem at hand. However, when it comes to building a product intended to meet the needs and requirements of customers, a lot more things have to be taken into consideration.
The infrastructure on which your product is delivered to the customers and how that infrastructure is configured and managed to best suit customer needs becomes very important. Infrastructure here refers to all the software and hardware components needed for the product to run and function properly.
Now, there are various ways to configure and manage these infrastructures whether manually or automatically using IaC. But most developers want to focus on development and would not want to dabble too much in operations. Serverless Computing is an innovation that was conceptualized to meet this need and various more.
What exactly is Serverless Computing?
Serverless computing involves the provision of backend services and the management of these services for users on a pay-per-use basis to allow these users to focus on writing and deploying codes. These backend services include provision and management of servers, database and storage, autoscaling, load-balancing, and many more provided by serverless vendors to customers.
The thing to note here is that although the work management of infrastructure is taken off the back of the developers, these infrastructures are still very much in use. They are all managed by the vendor.
What Advantages Does Serverless Computing Offer?
Serverless computing is a concept that brings a whole new perspective to cloud computing. Traditionally, to build applications, physical servers were a must-have. Then came the era of cloud computing where virtual servers were used, however, these servers were rented and you paid for them as long as they were running whether they were actually in use or not. But with serverless, you pay for only what you use and the job of infrastructure management is done by a vendor you trust.
A few other advantages of serverless computing include:
Lower Cost: Serverless computing is known to be very cost-efficient given the fact that you only pay for resources used.
Easily Scalable: There is often no need to put policies in place to scale in or scale out infrastructure to cater to an increase or a decrease in traffic. These are all handled by the vendor.
Simplified Structure of Code: An essential concept associated with serverless computing is Function as a Service and microservice architecture. Serverless computing allows developers to write codes as separate simple functions that usually perform a single job and communicate with each other to form the entire system.
Increases Adaptability: Taking out the operations work gives developers the freedom and flexibility to respond quickly to changing requirements and take ideas to market quicker.
Serverless Computing in AWS
In cloud computing, there are several providers delivering services to their various clients. Some of the popular cloud providers today include; Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Huawei Cloud, and many more.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) happens to be the most popular cloud provider with over 15 years in the market and more than 200 services, including some very powerful serverless options that AWS often advocates for.
AWS offers various technologies and services that help users run code, manage and store data, integrate applications, and lots more without configuring and controlling servers.
In AWS, serverless computing begins with Lambda. Lambda, a Function as a Code technology from AWS.
Function as a Service is a category of cloud computing technology and service that enables users to run and manage applications as microservice architectures. With FaaS, you execute code in an event-driven fashion. Lambda, AWS’s FaaS technology lets you run code for any application backend without having to provision and maintain servers. It is the foundation of serverless computing on AWS.
Some other important AWS Serverless Services are:
AWS Fargate
AWS EventBridge
AWS Step Function
AWS SQS
AWS SNS
AWS API Gateway
AWS AppSync
Amazon S3
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon RDS Proxy
Amazon Aurora Serverless
Other Serverless Computing Vendors
Although serverless computing began with the introduction of AWS Lambda into the market in 2014, serverless computing has grown so much and many other vendors and stepped up with their various offerings. Some other giants in the serverless computing world include Microsoft, which introduced Azure Functions in 2016, and Google Cloud Functions which was introduced in 2018.
These different vendors each have their different areas of strength and drawbacks in the way they function and the things they can do. It is therefore good practice for a team to carry out its research to determine what vendor would be best for their product.
Infrastructure as Code and Serverless Computing
In building serverless applications, the use of IaC can help to increase the speed and ease of development, testing, and deployment of the application. Depending on the cloud provider used, different tools are made available for this purpose. Some of the common IaC tools for serverless computing include:
Serverless Application Model: The Serverless Application Model or SAM, as it is often called, is an offering from AWS which helps to simplify serverless deployments. It is an abstraction from AWS Cloudformation (Another AWS service that allows for the creation, provisioning, and management of related AWS and third-party resources) which is specifically for serverless resources.
Serverless Framework: In a case where you use a different cloud provider from AWS or you work with multiple cloud providers, Serverless Framework is the tool for you. It serves as an open-source version of SAM that can be used across any cloud provider including AWS.
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK): This innovation from AWS is a Software Development Kit that enables developers to define their cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. In other words, instead of learning an entirely new syntax, developers can use programming languages they are familiar with such as Python, Typescript, Java, etc. to define their cloud infrastructure. It works for both serverless applications and otherwise.
Serverless Stack: SST is an open-source framework that makes it easy to build serverless applications and deploy them in your AWS environment. It is an extension of AWS CDK.
Conclusion
Ideas are the seeds for innovation and solutions. Getting an idea, in form of a product, in front of those who have the problem that the product is meant to solve should not be a process with a lot of hindrances. And it goes to show how much this is understood when solutions are put forth to encourage the development of products quickly and easily to solve customers’ problems.
Serverless computing, cloud computing, and DevOps practices are helping developers to get their products in front of customers quicker and quicker. The quick adoption of these processes would affect the entire progress of businesses in the long run as customers would always get behind the product that meets their needs faster and better.
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