What is Serverless.com?
In this blog post we’ll take a look at what the serverless architecture is and what the serverless.com framework has to do with it.
What is the serverless architecture?
At first we have to say that serverless does not necessary mean “no servers at all”.
Serverless means that the developer of the application does not have to think about servers anymore.
No more headaches about server updates, hackers, load balancer setups, availability zones, …
Just the developer and his code.
The Heroku era
The introduction of Heroku was one of the first times when the serverless topic gained significant traction. Heroku makes it able to deploy the application with a simple git push command. Heroku bundles the code, puts it into a container and runs it on the server. The user can scale the app from within the backend when the traffic spikes.
This introduced a new era of deployments and devops.
But there are still some downside.
You have to pay the bill at the end of the month for the whole time the app is available (even if it’s 99% idle). Additionally you have to have an eye on your application and scale accordingly when the traffic increases.
Introducing AWS Lambda
Amazon introduced AWS Lambda at the re:Invent 2014 conference. This was a game changer.
Lambda is basically a service where you can upload your code. The code will then be run based on events from the AWS ecosystem (e.g. Image is saved in S3 → run resize image code) or triggered from outside (e.g. through the AWS API Gateway).
AWS handles everything so that your Lambda code can run without problems. You don’t have to think how your code is run / the involved servers. Just upload the code and run it from the outside. Amazon takes care of everything else.
The neat thing about Lambda is that you only pay when you code runs. Additionally your code can scale nearly infinitely. It doesn’t matter if your Lambda function is called 1 time or 1.000.000 times. Amazon takes care of the servers so that your function runs smoothly.
In combination with the other AWS resources (such as DynamoDB, S3, API Gateway, Cognito, …) you can build a serverless application, focus on your code and pay only when your application is used.
However orchestrating all those AWS resources by hand is very hard. It gets even harder and more time intensive if you have dozens of Lambda functions, which you want to deploy into multiple regions.
The serverless.com framework
The serverless.com framework solves those pain points.
Serverless makes it easy to orchestrate your AWS lambda functions and the used AWS resources.
The Serverless framework is a Node.js based CLI tool which will help you orchestrate everything. You can deploy your Lambda functions into multiple regions easily.
Excited what this looks like? Take a look at this video which introduced Serverless (formerly known as JAWS) at the re:Invent 2015 event:
Excited? Head over to the Serverless GitHub Repository to get started. Additionally check out the “awesome list” I’ve created which consolidates all relevant Serverless resources.
Believe me. If you get the first “Hello World” application up and running you’ll see that this kind of development / deployment is the future of web based applications.
