Serverless

Introduction #

PaaS deploy applications. Serverless goes even further and enables the deployment of individual functions.

Thereby, Serverless allows even smaller deployments than with PaaS. A REST service can be divided into a variety of functions, one per HTTP method and resource.

The advantages of Serverless are similar to those of PaaS:

• A high degree of abstraction and thus relatively simple deployment.
• Serverless functions are only activated when a request is made so that no costs are incurred if no requests are processed.
• They can also scale very flexibly.

Serverless technologies include:

• AWS Lambda
• Google Cloud Functions
• Azure Functions
• Apache OpenWhisk. OpenWhisk allows you to install a Serverless environment in your own data center.

As with a PaaS, Serverless includes support for operation. Metrics and log management are provided by the cloud provider.