Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a prominent name in the cloud computing business. They are providing enterprise services such as data computing, storage, API Proxy, Application Integration, Orchestration, Analytics and developer tools. AWS is absolutely best when it comes to cloud computing. They are still leading the cloud market and playing an essential role in driving profit for Amazon. AWS has garnered $2.12 billion in operating income in the second quarter (Q2) and it is up from the financial year 2018-2019 revenue of $1.64 billion.
To maintain the level of success in the world of cloud computing requires a high level of efficiency and AWS is master in that. They have come up with a new idea called serverless computing. It does not mean that servers will be gone from the cloud operations, without servers it will be impossible to run codes. The motive of this unique service is to take away the worry of enterprises about the place and procedure that is involved in running these complicated codes. To understand the origin of serverless let’s look at the brief history of the idea.
Serverless Chronicles in the digital world of Cloud Computing
The origination of cloud computing services through time saw development and publishing of applications configured, managed, and supported physical devices manually. The process was severely time taking and required a huge amount of human resources and physical infrastructure to carry out day to day operations. The introduction of paid virtual machines makes it a lot better for an organization to use these rented remote machines for a quicker and safer way to secure its sophisticated business data. This new system was named Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It reduced the complications of failure and potential downtime significantly.
The business changed for the good as the concept of Platform as a Service (PaaS) was introduced in the later parts of the 2000s. Google, Amazon and other cloud service providers enabled developers with scalable, pre-configured and ready to use the secure environment to host web applications. These applications were written in complicated machine languages such as JAVA, PHP, Python, and other popular coding languages.
The next leg of the cloud computing development and a serverless approach provides additional advantages to PaaS with some new rules and limitations. It provides the architecture for application design that encompasses third-party Backend as a Service (BaaS), which includes customized code run in a managed virtual environment while using ephemeral containers on a platform known as Function as a Service.
Concept of serverless computing and its importance
Global serverless databases that allow ubiquitous and low latency access to app data without sacrificing data correctness. It eliminates layers of app code for manually handling data anomalies, security, and scale, creating a friendlier developer experience for firms and better app experience for end-users. The service has made dynamic data simple by allowing relational, document and graph access to the same set of data using modern APIs. This makes systems easy to work with.
Low latency from any location is available as data automatically replicated across regions instantly, correctly. Requests are routed automatically to the region closest to the user for low-latency reads and write ensuring snappiest possible app experience. This reduces complexity with built-in security that is easy to use, yet powerful. The system continuously delivers serverless applications using applications lifecycle management tools to leverage an ecosystem of third-party tools and open source projects.
AWS Lambda, the serverless computing service
AWS Lambda automatically runs developers’ code without requiring them to provision or manage servers. Developers just have to write code and upload it to Lambda and rest will be handled by the system. The firms that are using Lambda charged for every 100 microseconds for the execution of codes and the number of times that particular code has triggered. The recipients of this service only have to pay for the compute time they consume. The charges will not be applicable if the code is not running.
The Lambda allows firms real-time file processing with the use of Amazon S3 to trigger AWS Lambda to process data immediately after upload. With the combination of Lambda and Amazon Kinesis to process real0time streaming data for application activity, transaction order processing, clickstream analysis, data cleansing, metrics generation, log filtering, indexing, social media analysis, and IoT device telemetry and metering. Lambda can extract, transform and load every data change in DynamoDB table and load and transform data into another data store.
The enterprises can build mobile back-ends using Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to authenticate and process requests. The use of Lambda makes it easy to give a rich and personalized app experience.
Constraints in a serverless environment
Irrespective of all the advantages that are mentioned above serverless system has few drawbacks at a fundamental level. It supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python and Ruby. Developers can run any kind of coding in Lambda but any binaries that will be used inside must be first be compiled in the same environment. The time taken to execute a coding process is 15 minutes in a serverless system. It means long computing processes need some different approaches. Dividing the job into multiple smaller pieces, invocating the function again with the same job and information about the previous invocation process.
These are not the limitations that will not hamper the operations at a greater level, but in due time the companies which are enabling these services in the market have to iron out all the wrinkles from the system.
