Serverless computing and its advantages

Serverless computing is a method of providing backend services on an as-used basis. The service availing company does not need to worry about the underlying infrastructure because of serverless computing.  They just need to write and deploy the code on the present infrastructure. Before this, the users needed to pay fixed and recurring costs which did not depend on the amount of computing work actually performed.  Those costs depended on the bandwidth and the number of servers. But with serverless computing, the user can only pay for the service he uses and doesn’t have to pay the costs when the server is idle or down.

One important thing to note here is even if it is called serveless architecture, physical servers are still being used but the only difference is that the developers don’t need to aware of them. Earlier, anyone who wished to build web application had to own physical hardware required to run the server. But when the cloud technology was introduced, the users could rent some specific number of servers or some amount of server space.

In that case, the companies generally had to rent extra server space considering the spike in traffic or activity meaning much of the rented space was unused most of the time. As compared to renting the space, with serverless computing the companies can go with “pay-as-you-use” approach saving a lot of cost in the process. Another advantage is that the companies don’t need to hire developers for maintaining the space as the service provider is taking care of it hence saving cost for the companies. Cost saving is the first and in most cases, highly important advantage of serverless computing implementation.

The second advantage is the simplified scalability. With serverless computing, the developers don’t need to worry policies regarding scaling up their code. The third one is quicker turnaround time. The developers can add and modify code piece by piece and hence simplifying the bug fixes and roll out of new features. The fourth one is the simplified backend code. With serverless computing, the developers can now create simple functions which mostly have a single purpose. The best example of this is the API calls.