Serverless computing is considered to be a “disruptive innovation” that has changed significantly software development and ICT operations. Serverless, as a term, became extremely popular when Amazon launched AWS Lambda back in 2014. Over the past years, serverless has grown exponentially, because it is cheap, easy to manage and it effectively solves technical problems.
Here are 5 reasons why we, in the RADON project, believe that serverless computing will create a revolution in cloud technology:
1. It is money-saving
One of serverless computing top advantages is its ‘pay-as-you-use’ model, since you pay for the time your code is executed and the number of times is has being triggered. In a previous blog posts on getting to know the RADON vision, we have analyzed that as serverless functions are short-lived and are automatically deallocated by the provider, FaaS reduces the risk of incurring unwarranted cloud costs, which is a significant plus in start-ups and small companies.
2. It is time-saving as it has Function as a Service (FaaS) offerings
As Datafloq explains, FaaS was given a new meaning when Amazon released their Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda serverless computing platform back in 2014, as we mentioned previously. It has actually been referred as the next big thing that would revolutionize how software systems operate.
FaaS allows developers to run code on any type of application/ or backend service without provisioning or managing servers and uploads it to a provider. As Josh Fruhlinger states in his article on Serverless computing on Infoworld, that provider ‘takes care of all hardware provisioning, virtual machine and container management, and even tasks like multithreading that often are built into application code’.
3. It provides better security
As seen on Medium, serverless procides well-conditioned security means, as ‘programming flow protection, risks mitigation, fraud detection, HTTP floods monitoring , cross-site scripting forecast, bots identification, DDoS attacks prevention, and many other security aspects are quite solid in serverless computing’.
4. You can stop worrying about infrastructure problems
With serverless computing, you do not have to worry about hardware capacity requirements or server reservations. As Shareem Thahir in Datafloq pinpoints, developers ‘can stop worrying about how many machines are needed at any given point of time, especially during peak hours, whether the machines are working optimally, whether all the security measures are offered and so on’.
5. Serverless can lead to Green Computing
As we mentioned above, one of the core benefits of cloud computing is that companies that adopt it can save money; and part of these savings derive from lower energy consumption. Furthermore, according to a research by Stanford University, 30% of physical servers are in a ‘comatose’ state, which is about 10 million comatose servers worldwide. These findings are not in favor neither for the companies nor for the environment.
So, what changes with serverless computing? As Shareem Thahir explains in his article, ‘what happens with serverless computing is that the vendors make the capacity decisions and allot just the required compute capacity based on the needs of the enterprises, thereby saving the environment in the longer run’.
Wrapping things up
Nowadays, both the simplicity and the cost-saving characteristic of serverless computing is what makes it extremely popular. At the same time, from most developers’ side, it is extremely time-saving as they no longer have to ‘write the codes from scratch’.
Here comes the RADON project, which purpose is to create an advanced framework for defining, developing and operating applications (DevOps) based on FaaS computing serverless technology.
In practice, at the end of the project, a wide range of software industry organizations will be able to exploit an integrated software development methodology and an open source toolchain allowing a high-degree of reuse and automation of functions, services and associated data pipelines.