Abstract
Cloud vendors offer a variety of serverless technologies promising high availability and dynamic scaling while reducing operational and maintenance costs. One such technology, serverless computing, or function-as-a-service (FaaS), is advertised as a good candidate for web applications, data-processing, or backend services, where you only pay for usage. Unlike virtual machines (VMs), they come with automatic resource provisioning and allocation, providing elastic and automatic scaling. We present the results from our investigation of a specific serverless candidate, Web Application Programming Interface or Web API, deployed on virtual machines and as function(s)-as-a-service. We contrast these deployments by varying the number of concurrent users for measuring response times and costs. We found no significant response time differences between deployments when VMs are configured for the expected load, and test scenarios are within the FaaS hardware limitations. Higher numbers of concurrent users or unexpected user growths are effortlessly handled by FaaS, whereas additional labor must be invested in VMs for equivalent results. We identified that despite the advantages serverless computing brings, there is no clear choice between serverless or virtual machines for a Web API application because one needs to carefully measure costs and factor-in all components that are included with FaaS.
Highlights
Serverless has grown into a very convincing cloud solution for almost any type of application, promising to remove the overhead associated with infrastructure maintenance
We found no significant response time differences between deployments when virtual machines (VMs) are configured for the expected load, and test scenarios are within the FaaS hardware limitations
Higher numbers of concurrent users or unexpected user growths are effortlessly handled by FaaS, whereas additional labor must be invested in VMs for equivalent results
Summary
Serverless has grown into a very convincing cloud solution for almost any type of application, promising to remove the overhead associated with infrastructure maintenance. All major cloud providers are invested in this type of platform [1]. Serverless covers resources like computing, database, storage, stream processing, message queueing, and more, our focus is on computing resources, on function-as-a-service. This type of resource, referred to as FaaS, is essentially a stateless computing container that is event-triggered and lasts for a single invocation. FaaS can be used for data-processing or as application backends, including web applications, or more generically, Web Application Programming
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
