Serverless Series - Introduction to Serverless

Evolution of Cloud

The age old practise of self-managed servers had big time trouble and the data centre, where someone will manage your infrastructure, came as saviour to get away from managing hardware all by yourself. Since then evolution of each era with a technological transformation have been phenomenal from IaaS, PaaS, CaaS & FaaS

Launch of EC2 instance in 2006 was a stepping stone for Infrastructure as a service providing compute platform at scale.  And the journey continued swiftly with Platform as a service, Container as a Service and finally Amazon Lambda was launched as Function as a Service in 2015.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

At a basic level, IaaS public cloud providers offer storage and compute services on a pay-per-use basis. But the full array of services offered by all major public cloud providers is staggering: highly scalable databases, virtual private networks, big data analytics, developer tools, machine learning, application monitoring, and so on. Amazon Web Services was the first IaaS provider and remains the leader, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

PaaS provides sets of services and workflows that specifically target developers, who can use shared tools, processes, and APIs to accelerate the development, test, and deployment of applications. Salesforce’s Heroku and Force.com are popular public cloud PaaS offerings; Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift can be deployed on premises or accessed through the major public clouds. For enterprises, PaaS can ensure that developers have ready access to resources, follow certain processes, and use only a specific array of services, while operators maintain the underlying infrastructure.

Note that a variety of PaaS tailored for developers of mobile applications generally goes by the name of MBaaS (mobile back end as a service), or sometimes just BaaS (back end as a service).

CaaS(Container as a Service)Containers as a service (CaaS) is a cloud service that allows software developers to upload, organize, run, scale, manage and stop containers by using a provider's API calls or a web portal interface.

FaaS (functions as a service)

FaaS, the cloud instantiation of serverless computing, adds another layer of abstraction to PaaS, so that developers are completely insulated from everything in the stack below their code. Instead of futzing with virtual servers, containers, and application runtimes, they upload narrowly functional blocks of code, and set them to be triggered by a certain event (e.g. a form submission or uploaded file). All the major clouds offer FaaS on top of IaaS: AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM OpenWhisk. A special benefit of FaaS applications is that they consume no IaaS resources until an event occurs, reducing pay-per-use fees.

Mysteries around Servers

Endless open questions while dealing with servers keep flashing around all the time and Serverless had answers to all those mysteries.

What is Serverless?

Serverless does not mean that no servers! We all know that any action or task to be performed need a server. So what does Serverless mean?

Serverless is the native architecture of the cloud that enables you to shift more of your operational responsibilities to AWS, increasing your agility and innovation.
Serverless allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers, meaning servers are abstracted from the end user who avails the serverless functionality.

It eliminates infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning.

Advantages of going Serverless