5 Benefits of Serverless Computing

Cloud Computing started with the concept of renting out compute, storage, and networking services to developers. Serverless Computing abstracts the infrastructure from you. You need to write and deploy code to the Serverless environment. You need not worry about the underlying infrastructure, operating system, hosting and execution environment, and scaling requirements. All these are taken care of by the cloud vendor providing the Serverless service.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of Serverless Computing:

• Lower cost
• Scale on demand
• Reduced application go-live time
• Highly available
• Separation of concerns

Lower cost

You need not purchase or maintain any infrastructure or software to host their application code. Cloud vendor rents out the infrastructure along with the operating system and the hosting environment to the developers. You need to pay a rental fee for the infrastructure and the hosting environment. Serverless hosting saves much

Expenditure

In Serverless Computing, the application code executes when it is triggered Application code consumes resources, and the compute power only when it is executing. You are charged for the time when the application executes and the system resources and compute power it consumes while it executes. This pricing model makes Serverless Computing cheaper than other cloud hosting and execution models.

Scale on demand

Serverless services scale-out whenever there is a rise in incoming requests and scale in whenever there is a decrease in incoming requests. The underlying platform managed by the cloud vendor handles scaling. You need not do anything here. Serverless applications can scale-out massively and exhibit a high degree of parallelism. They balance the incoming load very efficiently.

Serverless solutions are distributed in nature and consist of multiple serverless components that can scale independently. If a particular serverless component receives heavy incoming traffic, then it scales independently. The whole application does not scale here. The ability to scale independently makes Serverless solutions Performant.

Reduced application go-live time

You need not purchase any infrastructure or hosting environment to host your application code. You can spin the serverless services in minutes and host the applications. There is no dependency on external vendors and suppliers for infrastructure and hosting software. You focus on writing the application code and need not worry about the hosting environment. You build the code and host it in the Serverless environment and save much time. Serverless applications go live much faster compared to other cloud hosting models.

Highly available

Serverless applications are highly available. The cloud vendors guarantee high availability in the Service Level Agreements they execute with you. The underlying hosting platform guarantees high availability for the application code executing in its environment. You need not worry about High availability.

Separation of concerns

Serverless solutions follow the Single Responsibility pattern. A Serverless solution consists of multiple serverless components. These serverless components execute for a short duration. Each of these components performs a single task. One of the components reads from the database. Another component massages the data and pushes the data to the queue. And a third component processes the data in the queue. Any of these components does not handle multiple tasks. They do what they are supposed to do. Single Responsibility keeps the Serverless design clean and addresses separation of concern.

If you are looking to build and deploy Azure serverless solutions, then you must check the “Mastering Azure Serverless Computing” book

Key Features

• Learn the Function as a Service (FaaS) offering from Microsoft Azure
• Build Enterprise-grade workflows and integration using Azure Logic App
• Build event-driven Serverless solutions using Azure Event Grid
• Use Azure Service Bus to facilitate messaging between Azure Serverless components
• Implement advanced Serverless services such as Azure Serverless SQL Database and Azure Serverless Kubernetes

By the end, you will be able to design and build Azure Serverless solutions using all the concepts you learned in this book.

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