Two distinct approaches have emerged in cloud computing: serverless and serverful computing. Serverless computing represents a significant departure from traditional approaches, offering exciting opportunities for innovation, operational streamlining, and cost reduction. But what exactly does it mean, and how does it differ from the established serverful model?
Serverless computing introduces an approach where you, the developer, only worry about the code you need to run, not the infrastructure around it. This narrowing of focus simplifies operational management and reduces costs by offloading server management tasks. In concept, it is similar to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) or outsourcing Facility Management. You focus on the areas where you have IP or can create value and let someone else own those non-core processes that extract value.
In contrast, most organizations use the Cloud for Serverful Computing, where you are responsible for managing and monitoring servers yourself, while still getting the most control and customization options.
Educating IT professionals and developers about these approaches and their inherent tradeoffs is critical to devising an effective cloud strategy. Your expertise and understanding are essential to choosing the right approach for your business.
UK Director for Cloud Computing Technology and Strategy at Akamai.
Definition of serverful vs serverless cloud computing
Serverful computing, or traditional server-based computing, involves a hands-on approach to deploying applications. In this model, you are responsible for managing the servers that run your applications, which includes provisioning servers, updating operating systems, scaling resources to meet demand, controlling access, and ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
This approach provides greater control over your IT infrastructure. You can customize almost every aspect of your environment to your application. For example, you can implement additional security controls or software, tune the kernel to maximize performance, or use specific operating systems that are needed to support aspects of your application stack. None of this is directly feasible in a serverless environment.
On the other hand, Serverless computing removes most of the complexity of managing cloud computing infrastructure by abstracting the infrastructure. With this abstraction, you avoid managing cloud servers directly and instead rent backend computing in an “as a service” model. There are still servers, but you don’t have to worry about them anymore; the provider ensures that they are available, patched, compliant, and secure.
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Serverless and Event-Driven computing are often used interchangeably, but while they overlap, there are some key differences.
Serverless computing can be used to implement event-driven architectures, as it can automatically scale to handle a varying number of events and only charges for the actual execution time. For example, a serverless function can be triggered by an event such as an HTTP request or a message in a queue.
Not all event-driven architectures are serverless, and not all serverless functions are event-driven. Event-driven systems can also be built using traditional serverful infrastructure, and serverless functions can execute scheduled tasks or be called directly by an API instead of being driven by events.
Determining which type is right for your business and your application
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and you will find yourself using both options, even within a single application. In an HR system, storing employee data in a serverful database is practical for supporting complex or long-running queries, such as payroll processing. However, multi-stage and ad-hoc time-off requests are well suited to a serverless application.
Serverless computing offers two primary benefits: simplicity and an execution-based cost model. By adopting serverless, enterprises can more easily manage their infrastructure, as the cloud provider takes care of server provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. This approach allows developers to focus on writing and deploying applications without the burden of managing underlying servers.
Serverless computing also improves efficiency and resource utilization, because businesses only incur costs for the computing power they actually use, and when they use it. Business leaders can plan more easily because they know that each transaction costs 𝑥 and we expect 𝑦, so our bill this month will be 𝓏.
When used on open standards platforms such as NATS.io instead of Hyperscalers’ data streaming solution, this transaction-based model can significantly reduce costs and unlock new opportunities for innovation. This allows developers and managers to focus on building high-quality applications rather than infrastructure complexity.
On the other hand, serverful computing offers businesses more control and customization over their infrastructure. By managing your servers, you can tailor their environment to specific needs and ensure high performance, reliability, and security. This approach is beneficial for applications that require consistent and long-term resource allocation, as it allows for fine-tuning and optimization that serverless models may not offer.
Additionally, serverful computing enables direct oversight of the hardware and software stack, allowing for detailed monitoring and troubleshooting. This hands-on control can be crucial for enterprises with strict regulatory requirements or those that need to handle sensitive data securely.
Why flexibility remains the biggest challenge
While serverless computing offers compelling benefits, it also brings challenges that businesses must address. On a smaller scale, serverless is a very efficient way to consume cloud computing services. As demand increases, it can quickly become expensive, especially if platform lock-in is a factor. Think of it as taking a taxi versus buying a car. Taking a taxi once a week is a cheap way to get home from the office, but taking a taxi every day to and from the office, to and from school to drop off or pick up your kids, and to the store on the weekends for groceries quickly becomes ridiculously expensive compared to buying a car.
To mitigate these risks, companies need to create a culture of cost control, open standards, and vendor evaluation. Choosing vendors with low or no egress costs can help control costs, and using open standards ensures app portability. This avoids the risk of introducing technical debt by becoming overly dependent on a single provider’s proprietary services or APIs. This will hinder agility and increase the complexity of migrations in the long run, potentially resulting in significant refactoring costs.
Balancing the benefits of serverless computing with these challenges requires careful planning and strategic decision-making to ensure long-term success in the cloud environment.
Balancing the Tradeoffs and the Future of Cloud Computing
The decision here is how you deal with the tradeoffs inherent in serverful and serverless computing: control versus consumption, open standards versus proprietary, fixed costs versus dynamic cost base. Looking ahead to the next six months and beyond, serverless and serverful computing are poised to continue to evolve in response to changing business needs.
While serverless computing offers simplicity and cost-effectiveness, it remains limited by factors such as speed and latency, like other cloud-based services. However, many providers have built Edge and Distributed platforms that deliver more advanced serverless offerings, bringing computing power closer to end users, reducing latency issues, and improving overall performance.
In contrast, serverful computing will continue to be relevant, particularly for applications that require greater control over infrastructure, higher performance, or specific regulatory or security requirements. There will always be a place for both serverless and serverful cloud computing. As cloud technology continues to evolve, we may see advances in serverful computing that improve automation, scalability, and resource optimization, further increasing its appeal in certain use cases.
Ultimately, the future of cloud computing lies in finding the right balance between serverless and serverful approaches, leveraging the strengths of both approaches to optimize performance, efficiency, security, and flexibility in an increasingly digital world.
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