In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, serverless architectures have emerged as a game-changer for developers and organizations alike. By eliminating the burden of infrastructure management and automating scalability, serverless architectures empower developers to focus on innovation and rapid feature delivery. With cost optimization, seamless deployment, and enhanced reliability, serverless architectures enable organizations to unlock new levels of efficiency and agility.

Serverless Architecture is a computing model where developers do not manage servers. Managing servers, which is handled by the third-party vendors, involves the provisioning, managing and maintenance of the computing infrastructure.

When to use Serverless:

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                             When you want to pay only for what you use!

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Serverless architecture is a good option for business cases that don’t always have to be on. In this way, organizations save money from not paying for idle time.

• High-Traffic Websites:

Static websites running on an EC2 instance can be replaced with serverless. We can host our static website on S3 bucket and serve our assets with a global, fast content delivery network. Not only is it cheaper and fast, but it is also highly available and scalable.

• Multimedia Processing Applications:

Build real-time and low latency apps like multimedia apps to perform automatic memory allocation and complicated data processing.

• Mobile Backends:

An API gateway acts as an entry point to our business functions. These functions can be exposed as the rest of the API that our mobile app consumes.

• Internet of Things (IoT):

IoT devices generate a lot of data from their environments through sensors. Organizations often struggle to process this overwhelming amount of data coming from the connected devices in a scalable way. Scaling to billions of devices and trillions of messages becomes easier with a serverless approach.

Why Use Serverless Architecture

1. Development teams can focus solely on business logic (code), experiment with ideas, and hit production on time.
2. Serverless architectures are scalable and highly available. Scaling traditional applications requires upfront planning, and for businesses to provision accordingly.
3. A traditional application could be overwhelmed by a traffic spike—probably on special offers day. In serverless, applications are highly available, and can scale automatically as users grow and usage increases.
4. It costs less. One of the reasons serverless architecture is gaining popularity among startups is because of its pricing model. The cost of running servers 24/7 and paying for idle time is no longer an issue in serverless.
5. Functions have allocated time in which they run and die afterward. The provider charges based on the number of executions and the size of memory workload used. This helps to optimize costs.
6. The time to market is faster. Operational tasks such as server provisioning, maintenance, and monitoring infrastructure are not needed and hit production on time.

Limitations of Serverless Architecture

1. When organizations require a fast response with a consistent latency of less than 50 milliseconds, Serverless architecture suffers from the problem of a cold start.
2. There’s a limit to how long a function can run. This makes serverless architecture unsuitable for tasks that run for hours.
3. Serverless architecture could depend on a single vendor. Migrating serverless applications from one vendor to another requires a lot of manual effort and major changes.
4. Hard to test locally due to vendor components dependencies.

Serverless Architecture on AWS