OpenXcell recently hosted a successful webinar on Serverless Architecture.
The objective was to help app development companies get acquainted with this latest technological trend that’s currently taking the tech landscape by storm.
Powered by Amazon web service, the technology allows you to build and run applications and services without worrying about the infrastructure part. Simply put, the server management of your applications rest with Amazon Web Service (AWS).
The webinar broadly covered three areas of the Serverless System:
1] Micro-Services
2]Serverless System
3] AWS Lambda
For the uninitiated, all these three areas are interconnected. The need for independent Micro-services by tech companies led to the rise of Serverless Architecture like Amazon Web Services (AWS); while AWS Lambda is the serverless computing component of Amazon Web Services.
Now, what are Microservices?
To understand Micro-services, we need to understand what is Monolithic Architecture first. Unlike microservices, monolithic (monumental) architecture consists of interdependent components. Given that the components are tightly-coupled, each and every component of the architecture needs to be present for the application code to be compiled and executed.
So, when a component needs scaling up, or some minuscule changes are required, the whole application needs to be rewritten. That means all the hard coding work done so far goes for a toss. So it comes as no surprise that continuous deployment and scaling is not a given thing in the case of monolithic services.
And, on the top of it, if the application turns out to be too large and complex, not only the start-time will be considerable, but even changes in the application may cause considerable downtime in the application.
What’s more, even a small bug in any of the components can bring the entire application to a halt.
In short, monolithic applications face monumental development challenges.
Things are quite opposite in the case of microservices, however. As it turns out, in microservices the modules operate independently (loosely coupled); and changes made in one module won’t affect the other modules. This means you can scale and descale without disturbing the other modules. This means you don’t have to rewrite the app. And given that this technology is still in its development phase, you could even expect more good things happening on this front in the coming years.
Key benefits of Micro-services:
- Easier to understand from the developer end
- Each module can be deployed independently so scaling up becomes much easier
- Each team can develop, deploy and scale services independently
Serverless Architecture and How is it Connected to Microservices
Great question. But the answer is quite simple. The different modules of Micro-services are loosely connected or operate independently simply because they are governed by serverless systems like Amazon Web Services that offers server management services. Meaning, if you are developing your application using Microservices, you can have different servers for different modules that make scaling and descaling of your applications, effortless.
Key benefits of Serverless systems
- Cost-effective
- Easier scaling and descaling
- Rapid development and iteration
- Super-fast deployment
To make the long story short, microservices is the new style of application development based on Serverless Architecture.
AWS Lambda
This brings us to the third and the final part of the webinar: AWS Lambda.
Serverless + Event driven computing service
Lambda is the serverless computing component of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its growing importance can be attributed to the fact that it can make code-on-demand possible, even without a server for that code to run on. And, it’s biggest plus point being that it’s unstoppable when it comes handling enormous tasks related to image processing and analytics processing.
Key benefits of AWS Lambda include
- Zero server management
- Continuous scaling
- Sub-second Metering
- Bring your own code
- Limited free use up to one year
Best Uses of Amazon Lambda
- Data Processing
- Real-time File Processing
- Extract, Transform, Load
- IOT Backends
- Mobile Backends
- Web Applications
For more information on Serverless Architecture check out this OpenXcell webinar
You can download the PPT on the same here.
Summing Up: The age of Serverless Architecture is upon us. So keep up with times by developing your new app on a serverless system or shift your existing app to the same with our help.
