Thursday 21 September 2017

The Upsides and Downsides of Serverless Computing

Back in 2014, serverless computing gained huge popularity when Amazon first released the AWS Lambda. Several vendors, an example of which is Microsoft’s Azure Functions, followed suit by developing their own serverless computing solutions that sought to address the varying needs of consumers or organizations.

Image source: cuelogic.com
A serverless computing solution offers the following advantages:
  • Decreased costs: There would be lessened operational and development costs because the organization can opt to use only the resources that they need.
  • More manageable cost to scale: Developers do not have to implement code to scale, in addition to eliminating the requirement of an upgrade of servers should the organization find the need to increase the used cloud computing services.
  • Reduced complexity: Serverless computing does not need as many interfaces as possible, including virtual machines, servers, operating systems, and more.

However, there are also drawbacks to using serverless computing. And while upsides definitely outweigh the downsides, the latter is still worth noting:

  • Possible performance issues: Because the allocated compute resources are dependent on the applications’ requirements, there might be high latency, which can affect performance. If high performance is a primary requirement, allocated virtual servers are a better alternative than serverless computing.
  • Tricky monitoring and debugging: In serverless computing, multiple server resources are used. Due to this, monitoring and debugging activities can be difficult to do.
Image source: trendsbuzzer.com
Eddie O’Brien has extensive experience in global sales and services, technology, international business strategy, and cross-functional leadership. He currently heads Arvato Bertelsmann’s Global Cloud Strategy. He had previously worked for Microsoft for 15 years. Follow this Facebook page for more discussions on technology.

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