“Serverless computing is a form of cloud computing which allows users to run event-driven and granularly billed applications, without having to address the operational logic.” BaaS and FaaS People like to poke fun by pointing out that serverless still has servers behind the scenes, but I want to discuss serverless, as defined by the SPEC RG Cloud Group in their vision paper: This missing piece is serverless computing! At the same time, it should be able to shift the operational responsibility to the infrastructure provider the way SaaS does, while still enabling the development of software with custom business logic. I say almost, because there is still a large gap between these three main pillars of cloud computing.Įspecially between PaaS and SaaS, there is a need for a concept in-between, something that caters to the development of more specialized applications better than the generic PaaS tooling. We have almost complete control over the level of abstraction we want to operate at, from managed infrastructure to full-fledged software products provided over the Internet. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and the missing linkĪs information and communications technology (ICT) evolves, we are gaining increasingly finer grained control over our resources while we are required to know less and less about their internal machinery, thanks to emerging concepts such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Each step until now has added a new layer of abstraction, simplifying provisioning and server management through increased automation, while bringing down costs by exploiting the commoditization of hardware, software and economies of scale. We have come a long way since the 50s mainframes and time-sharing were replaced by virtual machines and cloud computing, those in turn giving way to containers, with the creation of Docker. In a series of articles, Lucian Toader explores serverless computing, looking at it from a business perspective as well as from a developer’s point of view. All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.” - David Wheeler
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |