Understanding serverless computing
OK. Let’s get it out of the way. Servers are still there. The term “serverless” means that you don’t have to provision, configure, and manage the servers yourself. Public cloud platforms were a real paradigm shift by eliminating the need to deal with physical hardware, data centers, and networking. But even on the cloud it takes a lot of work and know-how to create machine images, provision instances, configure them, upgrade and patch operating systems, define network policies, and manage certificates and access control. With serverless computing large chunks of this important but tedious work go away. The allure of serverless is multi-pronged:
- A whole category of problems dealing with provisioning goes away
- Capacity planning is a non-issue
- You pay only for what you use
You lose some control because you have to live with the choices made by the cloud provider, but there is a lot of customization...
