What's serverless?

Even today, a number of companies have servers running in their offices. Over the years, public cloud providers have introduced concepts such as Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service, where the concept of a physical server becomes increasingly abstract. They even speak of serverLESS. But what is serverless, and does it actually work without servers? Stef Ceyssens, Managing Partner of Cloudway, has already carried out many serverless projects, and is happy to explain.

First there was Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where the hardware remains owned by the cloud provider and the VMs can be used by the customer. Then we evolved towards Platform as a Service (PaaS) where the platform above the VM is also managed by the cloud provider. Today we also have Functions as a Service (FaaS) where the customer has even less contact with the servers, including the virtual machines. With FaaS you also no longer have to configure the scaling, which you still have to do with PaaS; the cloud provider provides sufficient underlying VMs.

Serverless does not mean without servers but it does mean 'think less' about servers.

Benefits

FaaS offers several advantages. For example, the system scales with the use of your platform, which means that you have no basic cost: no use means no cost. But on the other hand, you can just as easily upscale at peak times.

In addition, FaaS also reduces the burden on the development team of managing, configuring and scaling the servers, freeing up time and focus for creating business value and building custom software.

From time to event

FaaS certainly has its advantages in companies or sectors that want to make the switch from time-driven to event-driven actions. Philips, for example, used to work with timebased processes where it took 12 hours before certain product information was visible on the website and if there was an error in the information and another 12 hours before it could be adjusted. This did not make the marketers in particular very happy. Philips quickly switched to an event-based service model so now it only takes a few minutes to make adjustments.

For Healthcare, it is also important to have the heavy lifting done by the cloud provider because many of these companies have to be HIPAA compliant. Thanks to serverless, we can build applications in a matter of months that used to take years, or where container technology just wasn't enough.

A final example is the Industry and Manufacturing sector where IoT uses a lot of devices that forward things or share metrics at sporadic times, then it's very convenient to put that scaling with the cloud provider and not be responsible for it yourself.

Holy grail

Today, serverless is experiencing success primarily with large enterprise companies - which also have the resources internally to jump on the bandwagon - and with start-ups and scale-ups that benefit greatly from the cost savings of scalability.

But does the advent of serverless mean the end of IaaS and PaaS? Certainly not, FaaS is not the Holy Grail. We operate on the 'serverless unless' principle which means we place as much heavy lifting as possible with the cloud provider but we still use container technology when the use case demands it. Long-term projects, for example, are often better off with container technology. Indeed, along with the rise of serverless, the popularity of container technology has also risen.

So it's not an either-or story but an and-and story.