Introduction to Serverless Applications

Serverless applications allow developers to run code without having to provision or manage any servers; developers can just concentrate on implementing the business logic of their applications.

As workloads move to the cloud, serverless applications are gaining tremendous popularity with developers. Serverless frameworks allow developers to program for the cloud to take advantage of elastic scaling for workloads and provide cost benefits of using pay-for-use features, only getting billed for compute time they consume. Google search trends have shown that searches for the word “Serverless” have outgrown the historic peak reached by the searches for the word “Map Reduce”. This suggests interest by developers and businesses alike looking to embrace serverless application development.

There are several serverless architecture characteristics which are different from traditional enterprise applications:

• Serverless applications are stateless
• Applications scale based on the workloads and can go to zero under no load
• Emphasis on event driven architecture and events triggering the downstream processing
• Cloud platform handling the application lifecycle

As you can see from several of these characteristics, serverless apps require the state of execution to be stored in a persistent database as serverless apps heavily rely on being stateless. The traditional databases designed before the cloud native era may not be a good fit for a serverless architecture. To architect a successful serverless application, we need to understand the effects serverless applications have on an operational database.

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