Serverless Computing : What Problems Does it Solve?

In our earlier discussions around Serverless, we talked around why some developers love Serverless. Serverless Computing does not solve any problem all at once. Let us go Serverless is towards a joke, in sense if the function is active all the time or demand is too much resources, traditional cloud server will be still cheaper. Current cost to run ordinary website (like, a less visited personal website) is under $10/month. But, Serverless reduces the headache of backend maintance or worry of dreaded Error Establishing a Database Connection error of WordPress. Serverless has specific use cases.

Serverless really works great when we have some event oriented problem on our hands. Traditionally, we use database triggers or webhooks. However, when we have events, and a lot of them, we often find that serverless is cost efficient at a small to mid-range scale.

A good proportion of all the effort of team usually goes into the purchase, configuration, deployment, testing, management and monitoring of the backend server infrastructure when everything is hosted on physical hardware or virtualised instances. Obviously, most of the businesses continue to pay for all the resource regardless of whether it is currently in use or not. Serverless removes the requirement to pay for the expensive computational resource which will sit idle for much of the time. In case of serverless systems, the business only pays for the resources it uses. Serverless enables the developers to focus on coding which delivers a direct business value which was present in HTML webpage era. By default, Serverless platform is designed to know when it needs to scale up and down our application. Although, present technologies makes it quite slower to scale up, still it works. Mostly on traditional systems we depend on horizontal scaling.
A good point of Serverless is the probability to combine with microservices.

In mid 2019, the cost of Serverless is too higher making it feeling it not going to work for long. But like anything with time the cost will go down making Serverless more affordable. This group of cloud computing is quite newer and many more innovative things to appear in future.