What is Serverless Computing?

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing is the native architecture of the cloud that enables companies to increase agility and innovation by shifting operational responsibilities to AWS.

Serverless is designed for companies that want to build and run apps and services in the cloud without thinking about servers. All infrastructure management tasks, such as server provisioning, patching, OS maintenance, or capacity provisioning, are eliminated. Serverless can be used for almost any type of application or service.

What are the benefits of serverless computing?

The main benefit of serverless computing is the ability to build applications and services with increased agility and lower total cost of ownership. The developers can focus on developing great products and services instead of worrying about managing servers.

No Server Management

When using serverless, there is no need for server provisioning or maintenance; there is no software or runtime to install, maintain, or administer.

Flexible Scaling

Apps can be scaled automatically or by adjusting capacity units of consumption (e.g., throughput, memory).

Pay for Value

Serverless is charged by execution or consistent throughput rather than by server unit.

Automated High Availability

Serverless has built-in availability and fault tolerance. There is no need for architecting these capabilities; they are provided by default.

The AWS Serverless Platform

AWS serverless platform provides a set of fully managed backend components for compute, databases, storage, stream processing, message queueing, and more.

Compute

• AWS Lambda - a service designed for running code without provisioning. When the code is not running there is no charges, companies only pay for compute time that they consume.
• Lambda@Edge - a service designed for running Lambda functions at AWS Edge locations in response to Amazon CloudFront events.
• AWS Fargate - purpose-built serverless compute engine for containers; it is used to scale and manage the infrastructure required for running containers.

Storage

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - easy to use highly-scalable, secure, durable object storage. With the simple web service interface, it is easy to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) - simple, scalable, elastic file storage, it scales automatically on-demand as files are removed or added to the system.

Data Stores

• Amazon DynamoDB - fast and flexible NoSQL database service for applications with single-digit millisecond latency requirements.
• Amazon Aurora Serverless - on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora (MySQL-compatible edition), database automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on applications needs.
• Amazon RDS Proxy - a highly available database proxy that manages concurrent connections to relational databases. It allows us to build highly scalable, secure serverless applications that connect to relational databases.

API Proxy

• Amazon API Gateway - fully managed service designed to simplify the creation, publishing, maintenance, monitoring, and security of APIs at any scale. It handles traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Application Integration

• Amazon SNS - fully managed pub/sub messaging service designed to simplify decoupling and scaling of microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
• Amazon SQS - fully managed message queuing service designed to simplify decoupling and scaling of microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
• Amazon AppSync - designed to create a flexible GraphQL API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources.
• Amazon EventBridge - serverless event bus service designed to simplify access to application data from various sources.

Orchestration

• AWS Step Functions - service created to simplify the coordination of the components in distributed applications and microservices using visual workflow.

Analytics

• Amazon Kinesis - a platform for streaming data on AWS, it offers powerful services to make it easy to load and analyze streaming data.
• Amazon Athena - interactive query service created to simplify the analysis of data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Customers only pay for the queries that they run.

Conclusion

Serverless Computing is designed to eliminate the management of IT infrastructure; it helps developers to focus on the development and business value instead of provision, maintenance, and management of IT infrastructure. AWS Server platform offers a variety of tools and services that help companies build large scale, highly-available applications. The payment model is very simple; customers only pay they consume, enabling the customers to have a highly scalable and cost-effective solution.

Sedmi odjel is one of the leading regional AWS Consulting Partners; we are a company that continually develops its relationship with AWS and invests heavily in the education and competencies of our people.

We are here to help customers build a high-end IT solutions based on AWS infrastructure.

AWS Serverless is an excellent option for companies that would like to simplify their development workflow.

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