One of the biggest technological advances in this decade is the usage of machines hosted by server giants like Amazon and Google for our businesses, in the form of AWS and Google Cloud Compute. Not only do these companies offer machines, but they also offer specific services such as databases, service to send SMS, online development tools and backup services. These services are collectively referred to as PaaS or Platform-as-a-Service.
Over the last two years, another new concept has rapidly caught, mainly thanks to Amazon’s Lambda. We call this FaaS or Function-as-a-Service, where instead of running an entire software program or a website throughout the day, we simply run a single function, such as sorting a list of million names or converting the format of 50 videos from MPEG to AVI, etc on a remote machine which stays on for only the duration of the time that our function runs and then shuts down. By not keeping machines running all day, maintenance and operational costs go down significantly. This particular way of running machines for a specific short-term purpose and then shutting them down is now termed as ‘serverless’ architecture. Continue reading “Serverless architecture”