Serverless or Always On? — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

A service on a server, VM or container is up all the time, ready to answer whenever a request comes in. That is right for a website, a database or a game server. It is wasteful for a script that runs five minutes a day: the infrastructure sits idle the rest of the time, and a service left running is one more thing exposed. Serverless is the alternative. You submit the code to a cloud service, such as AWS Lambda, and it runs when it is called. The provider manages the servers, so there is less for you to manage, you pay only for the processing you use, and short jobs scale easily. The trade-offs: you control very little, not the operating system, not the hardware, not the software running your code, and functions are short-lived. Code written for one provider's service is not easily moved to another, which is vendor lock-in. To sort a job, ask whether it runs briefly and now and then, or needs to stay up and under your control.

What you'll learn

Decide whether a job suits a serverless function (short, occasional, pay per use, provider managed) or a service that stays up on a server, VM or container
Recognize serverless's limits: little control over the environment and vendor lock-in

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.1 Compare and contrast security implications of different architecture models.

Key terms

Serverless Computing: A cloud execution model where the provider dynamically manages server infrastructure, allowing developers to run code on demand without provisioning or managing servers.
Vendor Lock-In: The dependency on a specific cloud provider's tools or platform that makes it difficult to migrate workloads to another provider.
Cloud Computing: The delivery of computing services including servers, storage, and software over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Container: A lightweight, portable unit of software that packages an application and its dependencies to run consistently across environments.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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