What Is Serverless Computing?

New technologies and nomenclatures often confuse the CIOs to the developers. Such a new thing is Serverless Computing. What Is Serverless Computing? Serverless Computing aka Functions as a Service (FaaS) is not technology but a service model for the delivery of Public Cloud. Service model does not mean traditional Cloud Computing Service Models. But if you are used with Platform as a Service (PaaS) from that Cloud Computing Service Model, it will be easier to understand this concept of Serverless Computing aka Functions as a Service (FaaS).

What Is Serverless Computing?

In case of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), some obvious humans ultimately managing the servers like traditional dedicated servers or virtual dedicated servers. So to install WordPress on an unmanaged Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), we have to follow a guide like we have guide for the relatively new users – install WordPress with Nginx web server. This demands some good working idea about SSH screen, running commands and basically the way is gold standard in server and computing industry.

In case of Platform as a Service (PaaS), we actually have guide on how to easily run WordPress on Red Hat OpenShift. It is by default few click work if the script is available which the end user perceives as Web GUI option. That same PaaS also offers a flexibility to code, run in own way, like hundreds of developers did with Heroku PaaS for setting web root. Such works are towards hacking (in constructive sense) and more difficult than working with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or virtual dedicated or dedicated servers.

In case of serverless computing, it is better easy form of PaaS, where the developers can test code using only the precise amount of compute resources needed to complete the work. So the developer is a fraction every time a function is executed.

Who Will Use Serverless Computing?

Anyone in future. We actually do not execute PHP snippet on MySQL server of a running WordPress website, instead we serve cached HTML pages. These FaaS are fine grained deployment model with per-second pricing. There are known bigger web business companies who are using Serverless computing at present.

At present, the infrequently used snippets are subjected to suffer higher response latency compared to a dedicated server, even virtual machine. This is obvious and if the runtime requires a significant amount of time to start, that will add latency into request handling. As that is not the issue with all types of codes (like handling a Web based backend, cron jobs), this model actually not bad to do more. Serverless computing is not suitable at present for high-performance computing.

It is named server less because the total thing adds an abstraction to any management to execute. A PaaS intense actually is subjected to issues exactly like IaaS, like we talked about DDoS protection for PaaS. PaaS practically became funny as paid service (except aPaaS) costs no less than IaaS, has similar plus additional security issues. PaaS is king for some segments like dividing on-Premise server in to developer employee usable resources.

What Are Softwares For Serverless Computing?

There are few F/OSS available, among them most notable is Apache OpenWhisk. Apache OpenWhisk is a serverless, cloud computing platform that executes functions in response to events at any scale :

There are others like :