Serverless Computing and Function as a Service

Serverless computing has ushered in a new era to an already revolutionizing world of cloud computing. What started as a nascent idea to run code more efficiently and modularly has grown into a powerful platform of serverless services that can replace traditional microservices and data pipelines in their entirety. Such growth and adoption also brings in new challenges regarding integration, security, and scaling. Vendors are releasing newer services and feature additions to existing services all around, opening more and more choices for customers.

AWS has been a front runner in serverless offerings, but other vendors are catching up fast. Replacing in-house and self-hosted applications with serverless platforms is becoming a trend. Function as a Service (FaaS) is what drives serverless computing. While all cloud vendors are offering their version of FaaS, we are also seeing the rise of self-hosted FaaS platforms, making this a trend across cloud and data center infrastructures alike. People are building solutions that are cloud agnostic using these self-hosted platforms as well.

In this chapter, we will cover the foundations of serverless and FaaS computing models. We will also discuss the architecture patterns that are essential to serverless models.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Evolution of computing in the cloud
• Serverless and FaaS
• Microservice architecture
• Event-driven architecture
• FaaS in detail
• API gateways and the rise of serverless APIs
• The case for serverless