How to Enable Serverless Architecture?

If you feel like one of the listed reasons or uncertainty whether serverless would be the right option is keeping you from adopting such an architecture, read on — we’ll provide you with a detailed explanation of serverless’ ins and outs.

In this article, we’ll talk about serverless architecture pros and cons, cases when it might be suitable, give you some tips and insights on this topic, and review top serverless architecture providers.

☁️ Serverless Architectures: How & When to Use

Serverless architecture provides you with an opportunity to develop digital products without having to build and maintain a backend server. What normally happens is: you find a suitable serverless architecture provider, subscribe to their services, you get access to it, and you finally set it up.

Taking all benefits and downsides into account, serverless architecture might be suitable for companies that don’t have a continuous flow of functions that need to be processed frequently. For example, it can be an app active during certain seasons like apps for football matches. They’re mostly inactive but when match seasons start, apps require a rapid scale, which serverless architectures are able to provide.

It might also be reasonable to outsource only some functions that are rarely performed. It’s possible to build your own backend for the rest of the features but relocate the least used ones to serverless so as to optimize costs. However, don’t forget about the cold start problem — to address this issue, we recommend talking to your developers about it since different cases require different solutions.

Another use case can be if you don’t want to take care of server maintenance, or don’t have skills, resources or needed employees for it. Yet, if you need something more reliable, we’d recommend using it as a temporary solution.

❓ FAQ on Serverless Computing

In this section, we’ll answer some questions on serverless architecture. We’ll try to cover as many details as possible, but if you’ll have more questions left, feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to answer them.

Does Serverless Architecture Work for any Type of Digital Products?

In case you’re wondering if it’s possible to enable serverless architecture for your product, the answer is yet. You can build such for all types of products — mobile apps, web apps, web dashboards, landing pages, websites, etc.

Containers are different from serverless in several ways. For instance, containers can run on any Linux and some Windows servers, while serverless is only available over specific hosting platforms (mostly public cloud ones). Thus, containers provide higher flexibility in terms of choosing a server — they can be used locally as well as on public servers.

Additionally, you can set up a container environment by using an open-source code for free if you do it yourself. Yet, you’ll have to either manage it yourself as well or hire developers to perform maintenance. Another thing is that you can containerize a product written in any language as long as the server supports it, meaning that you won’t have to adapt it to switch the server.

To conclude, containers might be a better option if you want high flexibility in choosing the host, have knowledge and/or resources to manage the server yourself/hire developers to do it. It will provide you with full control over the app.

Plus, containers are more suitable for prolonged functioning since serverless shuts down right after the function is performed. It also means that it’ll cost you less to host frequently repetitive actions and actively used products using containers since with serverless, you would have to pay for each action separately.

At Stormotion, we always find a solution to unite the best of two worlds and provide you with a container solution that has all serverless benefits, for example. If you’d like to learn more about it and ask some questions about your specific case, feel free to reach out!

✅ Top Serverless Architecture Providers: Review

Even though there aren’t hundreds of reliable serverless architecture providers, it still might be complicated to choose one. To help you with it, we’ve decided to review 5 of the most trustworthy ones and talk about their pros and cons.

It’s going to be:

1. AWS Lambda
2. Firebase (Google Cloud Functions)
3. Microsoft Azure
4. IBM Cloud Functions — OpenWhisk

# 1: AWS Lambda 🅰

Amazon offers a serverless platform called AWS Lambda. It natively supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby frameworks. However, they provide you with a Runtime API so you can use other frameworks if you want. To deploy your code, Lambda asks you to upload it as a ZIP file or even container image and then takes care of its maintenance automatically.

Amazon offers a free version that provides you with 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds each month (the runtime of a function multiplied by the memory consumed is 1 GB-second). The premium version will cost you $0.20 for every 1 million requests and $0.0000166667 for every GB-second.

To make the price comparison easier, let’s take these metrics as a rule: it takes 1000 ms (1 second) for a function to perform, there are 10,000 requests a month, the memory is 128MB. Plus, you’ve already used your monthly Free Tier.

• Total compute (seconds): 10,000 * 1s = 10,000s
• Total compute (GB-seconds): 10,000s * 0,125GB (we turn 128MB into GB; 1GB = 1024MB) = 1250 GB-seconds
• 1250 GB-seconds * $0.0000166667 = $0,02

With such usage, you’ll pay $0,02/month. We simply wanted to show you how it’s calculated but you don’t need to do the same since there’s an automatic calculator that Amazon provides.

You can work with each component separately without having to disturb the whole system. Apart from a command line, OpenWhisk also provides a Graphical User Interface, which allows you to manage your product with help of graphic pictures and markers. However, many users report that their GUI isn’t intuitive and the command line requires a lot of technical expertise.

Additionally, the system has some tech limitations: the maximum size of the code is 48MB, the function can’t run more than 5 minutes, and you can’t scale the number of triggers higher than 5,000 per minute.

💡 Takeaways

Serverless infrastructure is really beneficial, however, its advantages thrive under specific circumstances. Firstly, features and functions that you want to outsource using serverless shouldn’t be used frequently and/or constantly since it’ll cost you a fortune.

Moreover, you need to pay attention to the technical limitations that most platforms set. To make sure that these limitations won’t interfere with your workflow, you need to know the approximate metrics of your product. That is, how often each feature gets triggered and how long it takes to complete it (on average, of course).

To sum up, we’d like to say that the industry is really diverse and there are dozens of different ways to enable the server ecosystem. Thus, in case you’ll figure that serverless architecture isn’t something you want for your business, there’s definitely an alternative.

If you need any help with enabling serverless architecture or have some questions about your specific use case, feel free to reach out to us. We would love to help you!