Serverless

Last Updated: 2024-01-15

What is Serverless

Serverless or Function as a Service (FaaS) describes the idea that the deployment unit is a single function. A function takes input and returns output.

Serverless Manifesto

http://blog.rowanudell.com/the-serverless-compute-manifesto/

Function are the unit of deployment and scaling.
No machines, VMs, or containers visible in the programming model.
Permanent storage lives elsewhere.
Scales per request; Users cannot over- or under-provision capacity.
Never pay for idle (no cold servers/containers or their costs).
Implicitly fault-tolerant because functions can run anywhere.
BYOC - Bring Your Own Code.
Metrics and logging are a universal right.

Why not serverless:

Cold-start latency: serverless functions must be instantiated on demand. versus traditionally virtual machines or containers are preprovisioned.
Hard to debug and monitor: cannot hop on the server to debug.
Cost management: since serverless systems dynamically allocate resources behind the scenes, it is hard to manage cloud resource costs directly.

Examples

AWS Lambda
Google Cloud Functions
Webtask
Firebase
Knative: open source, based on Kubernetes

https://github.com/anaibol/awesome-serverless

Knative

https://knative.dev/

Kubernetes-based platform to deploy and manage modern serverless workloads.

Serverless users are afraid of vendor lock-in, so Knative is created to make serverless standardized and portable.

Google Cloud Run is a re-implementation of the same Knative Serving API.

Why invest in backend developers when your customers don’t care?https://serverless.com/ https://read.acloud.guru/why-do-you-care-so-much-about-your-backend-when-your-customers-dont-81f4e6433593