Web Emerging Technologies

Explain Serverless Hosting:

Serverless hosting is a method of providing backend services in an on-demand basis. Instead of paying for server space that can sit idle for long periods of time, you write functions that when called generate content on demand and deliver it to the end user.

Why use Serverless hosting:

One reason to use serverless hosting is cost reduction. MaxcoTec Learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28rXTYq6myw Explains it in terms of paying for a butler. Let's say you retain the services of a butler (or a server) to help with hosting duties for parties. You pay your butler $3,000 per month for his services. In January you host 5 functions that utilize the butler costing you his $3,000 salary for an average cost of $600 per function. In February you only host 3 parties but still have to pay your butlers salary so the average cost per function for February is $1000. In March you only host 1 party so the cost per function for March is $3,000! For the first quarter of the year you've then paid $9,000 for butler services. You hosted 9 parties for an average cost per party of $1,000. So let's assume a per party fee of $600 and then compute the same quarter at that rate, and you'll see that the same number of parties with an on demand butler would have only cost $5400. Saving you $3600.

Another reason is scalability. In traditional hosting a business will usually end up paying for more bandwidth than they need to prevent downtime due to traffic spikes. With serverless that's not a concern because every request is handled independently so as demand increases so does the computing power.

Google Cloud Functions

AWS Lambda

Summary of Documentation

The decision to move to serverless or not is a big one. According to Orangematter the pros of serverless are scalability, and cost. Also moving to serverless increases hiring freedom because developers don't need to be server experts if they aren't using servers. Another pro is the lack of maintenance costs. Crashes aren't their responsibility they are the burden of the cloud provider.

Because of the nature of serverless architecture one of the cons listed is a lack of visibility. Because the company doesn't own the server they can't keep track of what is running on it. Also because control of the backend is handed over to the cloud service they are no longer able to look at logs which prevents them from being able to see key performance analytics. This inability to monitor also means they can't be proactive in preventing issues like latency. Another concern is security. Orangematter says that serverless apps can be a greater security risk because there's a larger attack surface. According to Orangematter organizations that looking for reliability right now tend to shy away from serverless options, and lean towards physical on site servers to meet their needs.