Serverless and its benefits
What is a server?
A server is basically a computer designed to run 24/7 and provide service to other people on a network.
If you are using the internet it means you already interacting with a number of servers.
e.g. Web servers that send you web pages, mail servers for communication, file servers to store your files, game servers for entertainment, and so on…
The problem with servers is that they’re not flexible. Hosting your own website on your own server is good but only for limited visitors makes your server idle most of the time. This is called over-provisioning when you’re paying for a server that has a certain capacity, but you’re not using it. Opposite of this is under-provisioning, your server gets overwhelmed by many visitors trying to load it at once. Results in the server will run out of capacity and crash.
Now in this case, if you under-anticipate the traffic, your service will be slow down or go down. Over-estimate and the server cost costs you more.
Also, servers need a lot of maintenance, you have to update software, replace failed hardware, make sure for reliability for internet connection.
These divert you from your development, to solve these issues, cloud providers introduced ‘serverless’ products.
As the name suggests it does not mean any server involved, it means as a developer you don’t care about the server, you don’t have to manage any server or other underlying infrastructure. The developer can focus entirely on the application. You can get serverless storage, serverless database, and many more
There are 3 main benefits to serverless products,
1. You only pay for what you use.
for instance $0.01/gigabyte of stored data, $0.00001/100ms that your code is running, $0.25/1M reads.
This is advantageous when you’re not using the same amount of resources all the time which is very common.
With regular servers, you have to pay to fix costs whether the server is underuse or not.
2. They easily scale up and down
Serverless products help you to cope with huge demands. Cloud providers allocate more servers for your website if needed. Increasing capacity means buying more servers and configuring a load balancer to balance visitors' load. Serverless by cloud providers saves your time here.
3. You don’t have to manage servers.
Now this benefits you in you don’t have to buy equipment, no need to take care of update, did not worry about failed hardware, means no extra cost.
Some points go against serverless
- As it’s the cost is not estimated you never predict how much you need to pay, as cloud providers decided different costs for different services it remains unpredictable.
2. There are different cloud providers Amazon Web Service (AWS), server space, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud Services, Adobe Creative Cloud, Kamatera, VMware, and their products aren’t compatible with each other. It results in you locked with a specific provider. (Solution for this to build cloud-agnostic applications)
