Cloud technology is used in almost all businesses that provide online services. Services are obtained from the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that is on another location and is accessed through the internet. There are specialized sets of servers that are used for the services and are accessed online. According to the cloud model, the services are shared across the servers by different companies and in this shared set of resources, it is very difficult to keep track and manage these resources accordingly. As the cloud model is shared, it results in slow response and makes it difficult for different users to use due to slow response. Therefore, there are different concerns of the cloud service provider to upgrade the architecture of the technology. These concerns increase further keeping in view the increasing demand for computing day by day.
There were different evolutions in cloud computing. In the start, there were dedicated machines which then converted into a shared pool of virtual machines which consisted of separate operating systems. Then cloud computing introduced the concept of containerization, in which each container had resources to carry a job and provide a high level of abstraction and efficiency. With rising demand, CSPs are focusing on serverless technology.
Serverless technology is a revolution in today’s era of cloud storage and computing. In serverless architecture, the service provider dynamically manages the computing power of the server according to the requirement. There is a pool of resources like operating system, runtime environment,s, and hardware. It works as a function as a service model (FaaS). In this model, the application is converted into functions and the environment provides the execution of the functions in a seamless manner. The application consumes the resources and after that releases the resources, and the pricing model is applied just when the resource is used and the execution time is not included. In the serverless model, most of the responsibility is shifted towards the service providers and the developer, who develops the application to use the service and is at ease and not concerned with the management. The CSP is responsible for data center and server management and the overall environment.
There are many benefits of implementing serverless computing and getting services from serverless technology:
- Cost: Serverless technology is the best way to reduce cost because the database, managing server, and some logics are outsourced. It takes less computing resources and human resources to implement and utilize serverless technology. It is not efficient for every organization to build a dedicated server when there is serverless computing available and it does not increase any overhead but only reduces efforts and one can focus on other important things.
- Ease in deployment: Serverless technology is easy to deploy and can be deployed in hours or maximum some days. This is because it is scalable and there’s no worry about infrastructure and one can just implement the code and release it without worrying about anything else.
- Efficiency: Serverless means “pay per request” it means that the company is charged according to the use of the resource and there is less waste generated like if there’s a dedicated server it needs to be turned on all the time.
- Time-Saving: As the programmer does not have to worry about the architecture, therefore, they can put their focus on the other important aspects so it saves them time. Due to this they can have some spare time and can develop a strong user interface because customers do not have an interest in the architecture but their focus is on the user interface, therefore, to engage the customers there should be a stronger interface. As it requires a lot of time hence this can be done by using serverless technology.
- Scalability and flexibility: Serverless technology is very scalable and flexible. It can manage the load even if the load is increasing and there is no harm if there is less flow because the price is set according to the use and the price is not paid before the use. In this case, the business doesn’t have to worry about the load and growth of traffic because it manages the traffic according to the load and they have to pay according to the usage.
- Latency: In server-less technology, there are multiple servers and global access points that result in the increase of accessibility from all around the world and low response time.
There are many use cases that can be the best fit for serverless computing. Event-triggered computing, usually used in multimedia processing i.e. volume of data is uploaded, transcoded, fetched, and watermarked. It is also the best fit for big data processing. Usually, the data of IoT devices (sensors) is in bulk amount and requires intensive computation to process the bulk data. It can be used in live video broadcasting and many more systems. Its application is increasing day by day due to the exponential growth of traffic and customer demand. There are different cloud providers that are providing serverless technology, like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, and IBM Open Whisk. AWS provides an environment in which the developer needs to upload the code and it manages and everything like workload servers and scaling logic etc. The code can be triggered from any service of 140 AWS services and can be accessed from handheld or laptop.
It is very likely that more businesses are using serverless technology and the businesses that are not using it, will get benefit from it in the near future. Developers will use it to develop web applications, games, mobile applications, and IoT backend algorithms to process and perform complex operations on data. There will be a marketplace and widespread adoption of it especially for those organizations that are currently using cloud technology to gain a competitive advantage amongst their competitors. Organizations will adopt serverless technology whenever and wherever possible.