FaaS != Serverless –> discussion

Mart Laul — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 09:41:21 +0000

I'm trying to understand more about what the community thinks about serverless and FaaS. Here are my thoughts so far.

Since the introduction of the AWS Lambda in 2014 the event-driven, serverless computing has always been mentioned hand in hand with FaaS (Function-as-a-Service). However, I believe serverless is far from just being an AWS Lambda function, Azure function or Google Cloud function. It's like a whole ecosystem.

Serverless seems to be more like a specter where you have many different areas combined together. By analyzing AWS infrastructure, here are some of the services that in my opinion follow the serverless principles:

Compute units like Lambda
Managed Databases like DynamoDB, (pay-per-use, scaling by the cloud provider)
File storages like S3
Queues like SQS

As AWS already takes care of managing and scaling of the services, it is safe to say that these services are part of Serverless.

Even by looking at simple AWS Lambda use cases, we can see that none of them are only AWS Lambda based – they are combined with either Dynamo, S3, SQS or something similar.

What else would you consider as serverless?

Forem: Mart Laul

FaaS != Serverless –> discussion