Serverless Architectures
Explore the fundamentals of serverless architectures in AWS cloud computing, comparing them with traditional monolithic applications. Understand how serverless microservices operate, optimize costs with pay-as-you-go execution, and enable scalable, efficient application development without server management.
Serverless computing is a cloud computing paradigm where we do not need to set up servers to execute tasks. The cloud service provider manages and provisions the servers to execute tasks.
Monolith applications vs. serverless architecture
Traditionally, applications were designed on request/response models. The client would send requests to the backend, consisting of multiple classes to process the request and return responses. Since such applications are all bundled in one package, they are also called monolith applications.
With the arrival of cloud computing, developers deployed their monolith software applications on virtual machines on the cloud, such as an EC2 instance. They would install an operating system and the application code on these machines and configure a firewall to secure the application. If the demand spiked, they would spin up new EC2 instances, perform installations, and set up proxies to balance the traffic. In simple terms, they manually upscaled and downscaled the compute resources.
However, concerns about simultaneous maintenance and development can be draining for the developer. This is where serverless computing comes in as the savior. It takes on the responsibility of managing the servers and spares the developer the hassle of managing servers. Simply put, you can upload your code to the cloud, and it will manage the rest.
The architectural approach where components, such as authentication, database, and business logic, are provided by serverless services is called serverless architecture. The entire application is designed to execute without the need to deploy or configure any servers on the developer’s end. The illustration given below compares serverless architectures with monolith architectures.
What makes an application serverless?
Here are some of the core features of a serverless architecture.
Multiple microservices
A serverless architecture comprises many individual serverless microservices where each service does a specialized job. For example, an authentication service that gets credentials, verifies the credentials and returns a validation token that can be used by other services to validate requests.
An efficient serverless architecture leverages the existing managed services to decrease the overhead of writing code. For example, the Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed, serverless notification service that enables the creation and publication of notifications to a distributed set of subscribers. Developers can conveniently add the functionality of notifications to an application using this service.
Execution cost
Since serverless services do not have idle sitting servers, they only cost us when they are executing. Therefore, the serverless architecture helps optimize cost by cutting idle capacity. For example, the EC2 instance costs per minute without traffic; hence, it is not serverless. On the other hand, the Lambda functions only cost for the invocations and follow a pay-as-you-go model.
Scalability
Serverless architectures, due to its decoupled nature, are easier to scale as compared to monolithic architectures. Furthermore, serverless services scale independently and instantly. This allows serverless architectures to scale up and down even to zero automatically.
Serverless technologies are not only used to transform monolith architectures. They can also complement traditional architectures by connecting, integrating, or augmenting them.