How Are Serverless Computing Platforms Different From PaaS?

How Are Serverless Computing Platforms Different From PaaS? Both backend architectures keep the backend management to zero is one big resemblance. With PaaS, we paying for the whole and but in Serverless Computing, we pay only function execution. Origin of Serverless is plain HTML webpages.

PaaS and Serverless share lot of similarities in terms of operational abstraction and productivity. PaaS solutions are more versatile at present. PaaS can serve the services in addition to more resource intensive frameworks. PaaS solutions configurable to control accessories, like dynamic network storage, application scalability rules and so on. Serverless is another way of consuming cloud platform. When we have long running processes and applications, PaaS still should be our first choice. Serverless scales more faster than PaaS and automatically on demand, without the need of extra configuration. In case of PaaS, the developers can program the applications to scale up and down. It pushes towards a matter of forecasting to properly scale. PaaS-built applications are usually not as lightweight as serverless applications and may take longer to be up and running.

(Illustration is by CloudFlare)

Biggest point is that, PaaS does not need hugely different way of coding. It is mostly the way of deployment which is different in PaaS when compared to a traditional server. It is possible to run a traditional web application on PaaS without significant change in code. It is not too difficult to adapt WordPress to run on OpenShift or BlueMix. Of course, PaaS forces changes too but the change is not at the level of the core functions.

A WordPress plugin developed for the traditional servers actually works on PaaS. Few do not work for different easy reasons. Serverless demands coding in a different way to correctly utilize the infrastructure. Serverless computing demands good effort at coding level to make completely functional. Most of the WordPress plugins not going to readily work on the Serverless platform. Serverless takes all of the PaaS advantages. Serverless is not exactly suitable to “port” the traditional applications. Serverless thought forces towards the microservices.