The Pros and Cons of Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is one of the most recent models of cloud computing. It allows businesses to store their data and applications securely on the cloud network without having to manage their own physical servers. It does not require subscribing to a traditional cloud computing service either, which means that small businesses can make the most of both on-site as well as cloud storage options with serverless computing services.

Any technology would have its own pros and cons, and serverless computing is not exempt from that. While it can significantly help boost the efficiency and productivity of your business, there are some challenges of adopting the technology as well. Therefore, you should consider all the advantages and disadvantages of going serverless before making a decision. Below are some of the key points you should keep in mind.

The Pros of Serverless Computing

In serverless computing, microservices and codes are considered entities that are executed on demand. It does not require any hardware or dedicated environment to manage the service. In fact, multiple codes or services use the same resources in serverless computing. Simply put, it works like borrowing another computer’s resources in order to execute your micro services. You would have to pay a fee for every code or service execution, which means that there is no infrastructure maintenance involved.

There is no denying the fact that the main benefit of opting for the serverless approach is its cost-efficiency. In traditional cloud computing, you’re required to subscribe to a specific plan in order to access its resources whereas, serverless computing requires you to pay the fee per service or code execution. So instead of paying for the unused resources as well in cloud computing, it would be more reasonable for small businesses to go the serverless route to manage their overall expenses. Note that you can have a minimum cap set as well on serverless computing, but that would depend upon the terms and conditions of the service provider.

Yet another advantage of serverless computing is the scope of scalability. While all cloud computing plans would have a specific set of resources you can access, there are no such limits in serverless computing. You can make use of all the resources you need and benefit from a greater network of servers here. This way, you can easily estimate how much computing power your company would need at the start of every month to maintain smooth business operations and allocate the budget accordingly. At the same time, if you need to execute more microservices or codes, you can simply scale up your service or app.

Note that the entire process of extending the resources in serverless computing is fully automated, so you do not have to worry about making any changes to the server or creating a partition for new tasks. Furthermore, there are no restrictive environment parameters in serverless computing. You can have an added flexibility to manage your software or app development process. This allows you to execute even the most complicated code in a serverless environment.

The Cons of Serverless Computing

It’s clear that serverless computing would become more and more popular in the days to come because of the wide-ranging benefits it carries. However, before making the decision and starting to migrate your apps and services to the serverless environment, you should also weigh the drawbacks against its pros.

One of the main concerns with going the serverless way is security. As data is the backbone of any business, it’s important that you ensure maximum security for your company’s data. With the advancements in technology, more security threats have started to emerge in the past few years. Therefore, you should be aware of how to deal with security threats, such as DDoS attacks and insecure deployment when choosing serverless computing. Remember that a serverless environment would rely more on third-party components so you should carefully review them as well before opting for the service.

Experts say that debugging can be a bit trickier when your app or service is in a serverless environment. Fixing the flaws or errors would require you to depend on the tools and strategies of your service provider, which can make the debugging process time-consuming and more complicated in serverless computing. Additionally, some providers might also have a lock-in period to using their serverless computing services. For instance, if you choose to optimize the serverless architecture via a cloud service provider, you might have to make significant changes to the code base in order to move to another provider.

It’s also a bit difficult to build complex applications in a serverless environment. Managing the function dependencies and coordinating them would be very complicated with large apps and services as well. Apart from that, latency issues are a concern with serverless computing too. If your service or application would need a high-speed connection to run smoothly, then building it on a serverless environment might not be a suitable option. That is because most service providers would drop the container during inactivity until it is pinged by a code or microservice. This can cause slow connection problems for ecommerce or search websites.

As you can see that serverless computing can have many benefits for a business as well as some challenges too, you should make your decision based on your actual needs. Getting in touch with an expert to learn more about the technology and understanding all its possibilities for your business would be a practical way to approach serverless computing.