Learn everything you need to know about Serverless, including case studies, essential concepts, guidelines, and best practices.

Introduction

With the increasing popularity and adoption of services like AWS Lambda and Fargate, serverless technologies are gaining more attention in every company’s technology stack. Serverless adoption has become a boon and desirable option to meet DevOps firms’ unique needs. Serverless technology helps companies scale their cloud-based architecture. According to the 2019 Forrester report, 49% of companies are using or planning to use serverless architecture in the next 12 months.

How Did We Get Here to Serverless?

Source credits: The TechCave

Not so long ago, companies and individuals used to buy and manage their own software and hardware, from networking infrastructure to data stores to servers to high-level responsibilities hiring specialized teams and individuals for each responsibility. It was a kind of ‘do it all yourself’ (DIAY) type of approach.

Then companies started outsourcing some responsibilities. Then the cloud came, with the combination of virtualization, which laid the groundwork for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). These technologies and trends allowed for more outsourcing and, as a result, more focus on the business logic. Hence the software lead time, delivery of new features became relatively easier. Then came the containerization wave, and new services emerged as Container as a Service (CaaS).

Serverless was a step forward in this software movement or revolution.

As the advancements happened over time, the goal was always to remove developers’ pain and burden while creating software. However, there was still this server-side logic, code, and functionalities that were still a headache. That is when the Serverless trend was introduced, and with this, the server-side headaches have somewhat disappeared as this technology takes care of all the server-side logic and helps companies focus more on the business-side logic.

What is Serverless Anyway?

Serverless is not fewer servers or no servers; it does not relate to or involve running code without servers. It is called “serverless” because the firm or an individual that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent, or provision servers or virtual machines for the back-end code to run on. The main selling point of serverless is ‘focus on what matters’.

Serverless is event-driven, reacting only when something happens.

For example, do you use Alexa in your house? Then you are using a serverless system.

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