Category: Serverless Computing

Business Benefits with Serverless Computing

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

Business Benefits with Serverless Computing

The cloud has redefined the way we look at technology. One such redefining moment occurred in 2014 when Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled serverless computing, AWS-Lambda, that promised a few previously unforeseen advantages to businesses. Serverless computing, as the name suggests, requires no server housing, in addition to the benefits of continuous scaling and balancing, automatic fail-over, and sub-second metering (pay as you use). Below, we have listed in detail five ways through which your business will benefit from serverless computing.

Cutting Production-to-Market Distance

Conventionally, in a business, you are required to afford a production house wherein you will house your planning, design, and development, before final production; this requires you to manage infrastructure, server setup, and storage capacity with an immediate effect. With serverless computing, you no longer have to worry about these hurdles that mediate between your production and its market readiness. All you need is a serverless computing provider who will take care of your server needs immediately, and you will not need to dedicate a particular place for carrying the planning design and development—all of that can be managed on a serverless cloud.

Increased Benefits

With sub-second metering, wherein you only pay for the resources you have used, production costs are cut significantly which enables you to provide your product at a competitive price. Further, housing and maintaining servers is perhaps the costliest component of business for some enterprises which rely heavily on servers, such as online games and data retrieval websites/applications. Therefore, by using serverless computing, at one hand you eliminate the production-to-market, and on the other side, you cut down your costs — this directly leads to competition readiness where your product is better, cheaper and readily available.

Minimizing Fixed Costs

Fixed costs keep a substantial value of your product stable, irrespective of the delivery time, quality or price. Your product price has to be flexible to accommodate market competition. If competition arises, you have to be ready with strategies that give your product a better edge over the competing product. Serverless computing enables you to turn your fixed costs into variable costs by rendering continuous scaling and balancing. You no longer have to worry about maintaining your fixed assets that get occupied in housing servers. Turning these fixed costs into variable costs gives you the advantage of being flexible with the price decision.

Easier Pivoting

New businesses often need to relocate their focus of attention depending on their target audience. Serverless computing allows you to rotate this focus of care for the application that can be used differently in varying conditions. The pivoting might include revamping the application/website or redefining media promotion according to the required task. With serverless computing, you can have unlimited scaling which enables you to widen your market reach. You can also use containers (individualized services) to enhance the pivoting, since in that scenario you will not need massive rearrangement of your service packages, to keep you from an entire service crash.

Improved Development Management

From planning to production, application building consists of many sub-steps. Two most important of these are development and testing. Serverless computing gives you advantages that are otherwise absent from server computing. For example, serverless computing helps you to have a better overview of the development through independent service management. You can track and plan your progress of an individualized service according to its current status. Furthermore, these services are very convenient to be tested—the code is clean, organized and therefore easy to track. With these advantages, it becomes natural for development to be accelerated and checking to be more accessible and precise.

Serverless computing has many advantages in treasure for businesses. Through the help of serverless computing, products can be market specific, cheap, advanced, and adapt, all at the same time. All they need is an excellent service provider who unfolds to the business owners the vast repertoire of advantages of going serverless. Businesses can be competition ready through optimized development and testing and timely delivery of the optimal product at a reasonable price.

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Everything you need to Know about Serverless Microservices in AWS

Posted on by admin

Everything you need to Know about Serverless Microservices in AWS
It’s a well-known fact that handling multiple servers can be a painful experience, especially in the short run. Multiple servers mean multiple developers will need to work on the same code, making the code repository difficult to handle in the long run. One of the biggest disadvantages in the long run is the resiliency, which causes the whole back end to get bogged down, making the website crash and slow down eventually.

What are AWS Microservices?
The microservices architecture has been designed to solve all forms of front end and back end issues. The back end is wired to communicate with various small services through a network of HTTP or other messaging systems. Since the setup is rather elaborate, the whole procedure is time consuming and can take considerable time to setup. Post the setup formalities, a developer can benefit immensely by optimizing work through work parallelization and improved resiliency. Each developer can access and develop their own microservice, without worrying about code conflicts.

What does going Serverless mean?
The concept of going serverless is relatively new and has seen the day of light just recently. In an ideal situation, the traditional back end was deployed on a group of servers. Such an approach had its own set of advantages. It allowed the developers to control their own servers along with the infrastructure behind it. However, like everything else, it contributed a lot towards the cost, making it an inefficient solution for companies. Add a set of engineers to build, maintain and run the infrastructure, and your budget will increase manifold.

With the introduction of the serverless technology, all these problems can be solved considerably. You can make use of a service which will run your code, as well as take care of all your maintenance issues. What you do end up paying for is the time it usually takes to process each request thrown at the code. For this purpose, AWS offers the AWS Lambda service, which is somewhat similar to the functionality of Microsoft’s Azure Function and Google’s Cloud Functions.

What Services aid the Serverless Microservices?
Amazon API Gateway: API is a gateway service that offers the option to use a configurable REST API in the form of a service. You get to author your needs and create it in the form of a code. Say, for example, you decided what would happen if a particular HTTP Method is implemented and called on a certain HTTP Resource. In this case, say you want to execute and implement a Lambda function if the HTTP request comes through. API Gateway helps in mapping input and output data through a series of formats. Thankfully API Gateway is a fully fledged service, which is managed extensively, allowing you to pay for only what you use.

AWS Lambda Services: Being a pay as you go service, AWS Lambda is a well-managed service hub. It allows you to get rid of over provisioning costs, as well as avoid the need of any boot time, patching, as well as load balancing.

Amazon DynamoDB: Amazon DynamoDB is a document store wherein you can look up values through their key values multiple Availability Zones or data centers to bring about a subtle consistency. Like Lambda, it too is a 99% managed service, while the remaining 1% is free to perform reading and writing of code.

The Request Flow and how it Works with Microservices
In an ideal situation, it’s imperative to understand how the data flows through serverless microservices. The user’s HTTP hits the API Gateway; the API Gateway checks the HTTP request and figures if the request is valid or not. Through this approach, it makes multiple requests within the database and executes the business logic.

Another system which aids the processing of information within the serverless environment is the AWS CloudWatch. The AWS CloudWatch stores metrics in the form of numbers and text information in the form of logs. It also allows you to define your alarms over your metrics. At any given point of time, if your system begins to default, you can get an instant notification of the default using AWS SNS, making the process seamless and streamlined.

Summary
AWS Microservices are well balanced and fully managed, thereby allowing you to concentrate on performing multiple forms of other operational tasks. Through the concentration on other important tasks, the functionality of the code can be improved manifold, as it is performed through a series of automated tasks.

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Why serverless? Meet AWS Lambda

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

Why would a developer use AWS Lambda? In a word, simplicity. AWS Lambda—and other event-driven, “function-as-a-service” platforms such as Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM OpenWhisk—simplify development by abstracting away everything in the stack below the code. Developers write functions that respond to certain events (a form submission, a webhook, a row added to a database, etc.), upload their code, and pay only when that code executes.

In “How serverless changes application development” I covered the nuts and bolts of how a function-as-a-service (FaaS) runtime works and how that enables a serverless software architecture. Here we’ll take a more hands-on approach by walking through the creation of a simple function in AWS Lambda and then discuss some common design patterns that make this technology so powerful. Read more..