Winning in the Era of Serverless Computing and Function as a Service

Abstract

Serverless Computing and Function as a Service (FaaS) is gaining traction in cloud-based application architectures used by startups and matured organizations alike. Organizations that are keen to leverage modern technology to gain a disruptive edge, optimal efficiency, advanced agility and save cost are adopting these architectural styles rapidly. Cloud service provider offer and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources in serverless computing. The serverless architectures allows the developers to focus on business logic exclusively without worrying about preparing the runtime, managing deployment and infrastructure related concerns. FaaS may be assumed as a subset of Serverless Computing, in which, instead of coding a full-fledged cloud based application, the developer just writes (often small) functions which are piece of code (in one of the multiple programming languages supported by the platform) dedicated to do a focused, often single task that are invoked by triggers. It offers dynamic allocation and scaling of the resources and innovative trigger based costing model. This paper introduces Serverless Computing, and Function as a Service (FaaS), explores its advantages and limitations, options available with popular cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers, and emerging use cases and success stories.