In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, we often face various challenges while dealing with traditional 3-tier architecture applications. Issues may range from setting up servers, installing operating systems and necessary software, managing servers, designing applications with high availability and fault tolerance, and managing load balance – each of which may result in additional expenditure on infrastructure resources.
Understanding the Journey
Monolith applications, despite their comprehensive nature, have certain drawbacks – they are highly dependent, language/framework dependent, pose enhancement difficulties and scalability issues. In order to counter these shortcomings, there has been a shift towards microservices and serverless architectures.
What is Microservices?
Coined by James Lewis and Martin Fowler, microservice architectural style refers to when a singular application is developed in the form of a suite of small services, each of which runs in its individual process and communicates with each other through lightweight mechanisms such as HTTP resource API. Minimum centralized management of these services allows them to be written in multiple programming languages and different data storage technologies can be leveraged.
The Leap Towards Serverless Architecture
Ironically, the term ‘serverless architecture’ doesn’t imply the absence of a server. In fact, your application continues to operate on a server, but the distinction lies in server management and creation – you aren’t responsible for it. The serverless providers take care of everything while you focus solely on the code.
Although a serverless application shares characteristics with a microservice, it isn’t identical. While a microservice is larger and could encompass single or multiple functions, a serverless application depends on an event-driven function which consists of a small, specific code fragment.
Breaking Down Serverless Computing
Serverless computing has become the trendiest architecture in the software industry today. This architecture liberates developers from the responsibility of server and backend infrastructure management. Also, by adopting serverless compute service, developers can build loosely coupled, reliable, and scalable applications with ‘faster time to market’.
Essential Serverless Design Principles
In order to leverage serverless computing effectively, developers must adhere to its fundamental design principles:
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On-demand execution: Serverless functions execute code only when necessary.
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Stateless single-purpose functions: These facilitates improved debugging and testing as they are small, separate, units of logic.
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Push-based, event-driven pipeline: This implies that each function performs a specific task driven by events.
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Heavy and powerful front-end: Here, any static front-end can interact directly with the cloud services.
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Use of third-party services: Helps sustain scalable applications that require high-bandwidth pipelines or use complex logic.
Conclusion
Serverless architecture is a crucial paradigm: it enforces more efficient scaling, is highly available, easily deployable reduces latency time and cost. Moreover, developers have more time for core development due to the reduction of infrastructure maintenance responsibilities.
Nonetheless, this paradigm shift isn’t devoid of its challenges. From a business standpoint, since serverless architecture is managed by external providers, there’s less control over server-side, increasing risk involvement. Not to mention, adopting a serverless provider necessitates addressing vendor lock-in. From a developer’s standpoint, handling and implementing functions for large applications might be time-consuming. Moreover, management of numerous functions might be challenging, risking the creation of mini-monoliths. Along with this, reliance on third-party providers for monitoring and debugging tools is unavoidable, this often leads to a dearth of operational tools.
That said, the acceptance and success of serverless architecture are hugely dependent on the business requirements rather than simply on the technology. When used appropriately, serverless can indeed do wonders.
Tags: #Serverless #Microservices #SoftwareArchitecture #AppDevelopment