Serverless Architectures on AWS

Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without having to manage infrastructure. Your application still runs on servers, but all the server management is done by AWS. You no longer have to provision, scale, and maintain servers to run your applications, databases, and storage systems.

Building your applications with only managed components has become very popular, and AWS Lambda plays a crucial role in that. I see a tremendous interest in examples how to build such applications, and articles such as "The Serverless Start-Up - Down With Servers!" about teletext.io are read eagerly around the globe.

Nowadays, enterprises are embracing the serverless computing concepts. Instead of purchasing, managing and scaling your servers, the cloud model takes the charge of server deployments or software installations. Know more about serverless computing using AWS Lambda.

There's a shift underway toward serverless cloud architectures. With the release of serverless compute technologies, such as AWS Lambda, developers are now building entirely serverless platforms at scale. In these new architectures, traditional back-end servers are replaced with cloud functions acting as discrete single-purpose services. By composing and combining these serverless cloud functions together in a loose orchestration, and adopting useful third-party services, you can build powerful yet easy to understand applications. Serverless architecture is about building rich, scalable, high-performing, and cost-effective systems without having to worry about traditional compute infrastructure, having more time to focus on code, and moving quickly.

When people aren’t talking about Docker and containers, they’re usually talking about serverless architecture — code that runs without servers. How is that possible? Well, technically, the code still runs on servers, but you’re not the one in charge of managing them. It’s kind of like the cloud, where people just accept that data goes in the cloud and comes back out just the way you requested it. Of course, we know it’s not that easy. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scene. The same holds true for “serverless” code execution… and it’s really cool.

Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly depend on third-party
services (knows as Backend as a Service or "BaaS") or on custom code that's run
in ephemeral containers (Function as a Service or "FaaS"), the best known
vendor host of which currently is AWS Lambda. By using these ideas, and by moving much
behavior to the front end, such architectures remove the need for the traditional
'always on' server system sitting behind an application. Depending on the circumstances,
such systems can significantly reduce operational cost and complexity at a cost of vendor
dependencies and (at the moment) immaturity of supporting services.

How can serverless computing help your production infrastructure?

For some time, we’ve been using AWS Lambda with SNS topics and votebots, but we hadn’t tried anything big with it. Until now. The Serverless framework gave us the push we needed. Our goal? To power an application useful to a business function via an API built with AWS Lambda and API Gateway, harming no EC2 instances in the process.