Decoding Myths of Serverless application

Enterprise Cloud providers offer serverless applications in which they allow their users to write codes and infrastructure. Users have the advantage of writing multiple functions to implement business logic. The system involves the use of serverless architecture. 

Serverless architecture works on streamlining traditional systems’ complexity by abolishing the need to manage the IT infrastructure. It helps the developers to focus on their core issues and reduce the number of codes they need to write. Serverless architecture is a new boom, and many myths surround it. 

Decoding some myths:

Serverless means functions as service

Serverless architecture focuses on development time on code rather than the infrastructure. The FaaS offering AWS lambda may dominate serverless computing; many other serverless options may come into play. 

Cloud computing may be classified as serverless – when there are no servers to expose, and you pay for what you use. All the services are flexible, and they scale automatically. The results of serverless applications give you real-time analytics and processing features. It takes into account different integration and monitoring functions.

It is a monolithic silver bullet

Serverless application is not a silver bullet. There are many challenges of traditional server architecture, including non-resilience to failure, non-scalability, state management, and synchronous calls resulting in the coupled system. 

That said, there are many benefits of using the serverless application with event-based patterns. It enables immutable and sharable events and is entirely optimizable. It is highly resilient to failure and can scale effectively. The main challenge here is to avoid recreating monolithic applications in serverless. Designing the architecture using some of these principles will help you take better advantage.

It means an end to operational burdens

Serverless applications require constant observability. It is hard to determine if something goes wrong in a serverless environment. It requires the ability to interrogate the state of the system in whole and part. With interrogation, you need to ensure that each component of the system supports downstream tracing.

Most serverless applications need deployment with rollbacks and paths. The most potent tool for serverless developers is distributed tracing. It allows end-to-end visibility of the transaction when those request multiple hops. It shows service dependency and establishes a baseline of performance. Pay extra attention to the operational effort to monitor, maintain and scale a serverless system.

It is infinitely scalable

Most people are under the impression that serverless applications correspond to scalability. However, being scalable does not mean you’ll be able to scale it infinitely. The services have their limits when it comes to scalability. 

You need to work on some best practices as a developer in controlling the scalability. Schedule the function execution need for the warming part. Use different environment variables and minimize the packages. Insatiate the connections outside the event handler. 

Final words,  

The focus of serverless applications is on innovating solutions rather than focusing on IT infra. Ignore the above myths and go beyond the functions of technology. Apply it to the event-based architectural setup instead of concentrating it on a monolithic—plan for different failure scenarios to improve resiliency.