Serverless has moved on from being a buzzword to a trend that everyone wants a piece of. One of the fastest-growing cloud service models, the global serverless architecture market size projected to reach USD 21,988.07 Million by 2025 from USD 3,105.64 Million in 2017, registering a CAGR of 27.8% from 2018 to 2025.
Driven by the rising need to eliminate server management, enable rapid application development, reduce operational complexities and increase DevOps efficiencies, serverless is bringing in a wave of efficiency. Serverless architecture is now considered an ideal solution to increase developer productivity by enabling them to deliver massively scalable and event-driven applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure issues such as server management, networking, storage systems, etc.
Welcome to Serverless on AWS
As is the case in so many other areas, AWS is one of the market leaders in serverless.
With AWS, enterprises can take a serverless-first approach towards building applications to increase the agility of the entire application stack. AWS enables this with:
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda, Amazon’s serverless computing platform comes armed with the right features to help the serverless trend take off. Complete with auto-scaling, and a pay-for-value billing model. This event-driven compute service enables enterprises to run code in response to events from over 150 natively integrated AWS and SaaS sources – without having to manage any servers.
This compute service allows enterprises to create workload-aware cluster scaling logic, maintain event integrations, and manage runtimes. It enables auto-scaling of applications by running code in response to each event. Enterprises also only pay for the compute time consumed – every millisecond the code executes and the number of times the code is triggered. It also has a compute savings plan that further adds to cost efficiencies by delivering additional saving of almost 17%.
AWS Lambda also allows enterprises to keep their code initialized, enables provisioning concurrency, and optimized code execution time. However, functions executed on Lambda have to be stateless placing some limitations on the workloads that can be run on this platform. Despite this, Lambda remains among the most popular serverless solution.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers. It works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and makes it infinitely easier for enterprises to focus on building applications without worrying about provisioning and server management.
With Fargate, enterprises get access to the right amount of compute resources without worrying about choosing instances or scaling cluster capacity. Here too, there is no money wasted on over-provisioning and enterprises only pay for the resources needed to run the containers.
Tasks and pods in Fargate have their own isolated compute environment as each task or pod runs in its own kernel thereby providing workload isolation to applications and greater security. This also makes it perfect to run mission-critical applications.
Along with compute resources, AWS serverless also provides functions to drive Application Integration using:
Amazon EventBridge – A serverless event bus that can be used to build event-driven applications at scale using events generated from your applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services.
AWS StepFunctions – A serverless function orchestrator that enables enterprises to sequence AWS Lambda functions and multiple AWS services into business-critical applications without worrying about managing retries, and debugging failures.
Amazon SQS – A queueing service that helps enterprises eliminate complexity and overheads of managing and operating message-oriented middleware. This service allows enterprises to decouple and scale microservices, serverless applications, and distributed systems.
Amazon SNS – A managed service to help enterprises handle application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication.
Amazon API gateway – Enables developers to create, publish monitor, and secure APIs at scale for web applications and serverless workloads
AWS App Sync – Helps developers to create flexible APIs and allows front-end developers query multiple databases, microservices, and APIs employing a single GraphQL endpoint.
Along with these services, AWS serverless also boasts of a Data Store. Services like Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS proxy, and Amazon Aurora Serverless help enterprises manage their data needs to drive performance, industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and resilience.
In Conclusion
As technology continues to expand exponentially it will bring in many challenges to maintain dependencies. Serverless, in this scenario, emerges as a great solution. We can place a bet on serverless also because developers now need to focus more on the logic on customer interaction than on the infrastructure. With serverless, developers can build and maintain applications easily while remaining cost-effective.
In this journey, AWS serverless computing platform remains ahead of many others mainly because of its managed infrastructure, easy integration with other AWS tools, event-driven architecture, higher modularity, and automatic scaling.
AWS Lambda also supports most major languages out-of-the-box, including Java, Python, Node.js, Go, and C#, with functions written in any runtime. Lambda destinations reduce complexity and allow enterprises to orchestrate functions with flexibility. Apart from these benefits, AWS has a thriving and supportive serverless community that helps a great deal when navigating these waters.While we are recognizing the advantages of Serverless, we need to understand that serverless, apart from being a low-cost solution, comes with some awesome capabilities that can enhance core operations in production. So, are you planning on embarking on this journey? If yes, we can help.
