5 Benefits Of Serverless Computing
You can build robust apps without creating or maintaining servers by using serverless instead.
Have you ever tried to build a web application and wondered how to create a server and maintain it to be able to run your application’s code?
If you find it difficult to create and maintain servers for your web apps you’re probably not alone.
Maintaining servers, patching, and fixing them when things go wrong can be a daunting process.
It often requires the proper expertise or hiring people who have the necessary skills and experience of working with servers.
Furthermore, scaling your servers to accommodate the traffic to your website or application is yet another complex task.
However, with the rise of serverless computing, it is becoming increasingly easier and quicker to run server code without creating and maintaining servers.
Serverless computing lets you run code without provisioning or maintaining servers.
Serverless does not mean there are no servers, that would be impossible, it only means that the servers are managed for you and abstracted away so you can focus only on the actual code.
This makes it much simpler and quicker to launch web applications and run your server code.
If you want to find out how to do that practically for your website or web app, read this article.
In this article, however, we’ll focus on the benefits of using serverless services over their “server-full” counterparts.
1. Not Having To Maintain Servers
The first and most obvious benefit is being able to run our server code without creating, managing, patching, or fixing your server infrastructure.
The server is often fully managed and abstracted away by the cloud provider.
This is often an enormous advantage for businesses that need to build and get to market fast, as well as test MVPs quickly. It allows them to focus on writing and deploying code with serverless functions without worrying about the infrastructure that runs their code.
2. Cost savings
With serverless services, you only pay for what you use. Compare that pricing model to provisioning servers where you pay a constant fixed price even when they are not in use.
With physical servers, you will be charged the same costs when usage is low as when it is normal.
When usage is high, your server can become overloaded and you would need to provision more servers, add load balancers, and manage them dynamically, adding a lot more to your costs.
Many applications today have ephemeral transactions, and running a server 365 days a year will often be a waste of resources and money.
With serverless functions, your ephemeral transactions on your web app are executed only for the duration of the transaction and automatically stopped when they are done, charging you for the brief few hundred milliseconds they ran, making it very cost-effective.
4. Scalability
When your user base grows, your servers will inevitably need to scale accordingly if your application is to remain functional.
Scaling servers yourself is a highly complex task. It requires provisioning multiple servers, adding a load balancer to distribute the weight on each server equally, and configuring weighing policies for circumstances like a failing server or routing high traffic in a certain region.
Serverless services are highly scalable by default. AWS API Gateway (a serverless rest API), for instance, can accommodate millions of requests per second. All of the scaling details are fully managed for you.
Serverless functions like AWS Lambda can scale to match your needs as well, to as many concurrent reads and writes your application performs.
3. High Availability
Serverless services often provide built-in redundancy and fault tolerance, ensuring high availability for applications without the need for developers to implement complex failover mechanisms.
Remaining highly available is critical when you have large-scale applications that traverse the globe.
High availability allows you to remain close to your users, enhancing their user experience and being fault-tolerant when servers go down in a certain region.
This is again a complex task to execute with servers, but serverless services provide high availability by default.
5. Sustainability
Serverless computing is resource efficient, utilizing resources based on demand only, and minimizing idle resource consumption.
Serverless platforms enable more efficient use of computing resources, leading to lower overall energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
With platforms like AWS and Azure, you share the infrastructure, which promotes resource efficiency and reduces the environmental impact associated with hardware production and disposal.
Conclusion
Serverless services have several benefits that we as businesses and developers can make use of to build robust software.
Their benefits offer quicker times to production, remove the overhead of managing and provisioning servers, allow us to scale higher, and save on costs by adopting a pay-per-use model.
With these various benefits, serverless services provide us with a more modern and sustainable way to build on the cloud, promoting environmental awareness while maintaining high efficiency and performance for our software solutions.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I hope you learned something of value in this article of The Serverless Spotlight.
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Uriel