AWS serverless compute services allow to build and deploy applications on AWS cloud without having to manage the servers. AWS serverless platform enables vendors to deploy cloud solutions without server provisioning, deploying, maintaining and monitoring applications, databases or storage servers. It contains features like customized configuration, easy maintenance, strong security, scalability, high availability, monitoring, etc.
What is Serverless Platform?
Serverless does not mean to execute an application without servers. It is a model followed by cloud providers, where provider manages machine and resources on their own infrastructure, and provides services via dynamic allocation of machines and resources to build and run applications and services, which is known as “BaaS”(Business as a service) or “FaaS” (Function as a service) where code is executed in ephemeral containers. Pricing is based on resources consumed during execution of task.
Capabilities of the AWS Serverless Platform
Cloud Logic Layer
AWS Lambda can act as a logic layer for all containerized and microservices applications
Orchestration Management
Coordinate and manage the state of each distributed component of the serverless application using AWS Step functions
Application Lifecycle Management
Continuously deliver your serverless applications using lifecycle management tools such as AWS CodePipeline
Security and Access Control
Secure entire environment and AWS Resources with AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) and Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Reliability and Performance
AWS provides highly available, scalable and secure services at lower cost
Global Scale and Reach
AWS offers a broad set of global products. Mostly all serverless services are available in multiple AWS Regions
Serverless Application Use Cases
Web Applications
Build Serverless web applications that automatically scale up and down and run in highly available configuration across multiple available AWS Regions with zero infrastructure effort required for scalability using Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Real-time File Processing
After uploading the data in Amazon S3, S3 is able to trigger AWS Lambda to process the data instantaneously. AWS Lambda can be used to generate thumbnail images, transcode videos, index files, process logs, validate content, aggregate and filter data in real-time.
Mobile Backends
Build backend to authenticate and process API requests through AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway
Benefits
- Reduced Cost – Serverless computing pricing model is pay-as-you-go. It costs for resources one consumes and nothing when the application doesn’t run. Also, AWS takes care of infrastructure maintenance and updates so developers can spend more time on software development.
- Elastic scalability — A serverless architecture in AWS has the potential to scale up and down according to application workload.
- Reduced responsibilities for developers and faster releases — Developers don’t need to worry about resource distribution, scaling, application deployment, and workload intensity. AWS handles these issues for serverless architecture. Developers should only compile their code, zip it, and upload it to the new serverless platform to deploy new functions.
- Multi-language support — AWS serverless platforms support multiple programming languages like Node, Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Go, etc., so developers can choose the most convenient option for themselves.
- Built-in logging and monitoring mechanisms — AWS has developed its own solutions for user logging and monitoring. In addition, it also offers automated security assessment that improves compliance of application deployed on AWS.
Challenges
- Cold start — Key benefit of serverless computing is the dynamic allocation of resources, due to which vendors don’t need pay for idle time. However, sometimes this may result in invocation latency.
- Resource limits — Serverless computing imposes limits on resources memory, execution time, bandwidth, and CPU usage, e.g. the maximum execution time per request is 900 seconds (or 15 minutes) for AWS Lambda.
- Inadequate application testing — Serverless infrastructure enables to test small functions of an application independently but it may be challenging to test the infrastructure and the combination of all functions.
- Increased security concerns — There are limited options for identifying problems and bottlenecks if any malicious code or attack occurs on lambda functions. Developers also have no full access over the AWS servers.
- Access to the file system level — A serverless architecture isn’t the best choice for software that requires access to the file system or operating system level. These types of applications need to do things such as read attributes from configuration files or split in-memory cache to disk, but serverless functions don’t allow this. Serverless functions are stateless so whenever applications require state, serverless functions are not a good fit.
Serverless services make applications easier to scale and faster to develop without managing typical server-based infrastructure. Developers can focus more on core products instead of operating servers. As a result of which more and more organizations are preferring serverless platforms.
Using AWS serverless platform, VOLANSYS helps design stable, reliable, and efficient cloud solutions fulfilling business needs and value. We offer cloud solutions for connected app development, cloud computing platform architecture design, cloud migration, SaaS services, DevOps orchestration services and cloud solution modernization. As a standard AWS consulting partner and having in-depth expertise on AWS products and solutions, VOLANSYS help enterprises to implement serverless architecture solutions for a variety of use-cases.
Stay tuned to know more about serverless multi-tier architecture in our next blog.
About the Author: Aarti Parikh
Aarti is AWS Certified Solution Architect, AWS Certified developer and AWS Business & Technical Professional. She is associated with VOLANSYS Technologies as a Cloud Engineer. She has good hands-on experience on Serverless systems, Designing, developing and maintaining cloud Infrastructure for public clouds and architecting cloud solutions for enterprise applications.
