AWS Serverless

We could define serverless computing as a cloud computing model, whose main characteristic is that the application developer has to focus only on the business logic and should not worry about factors such as:

• Computing capacity planning
• The configuration
• Management
• Maintenance
• Fault tolerance
• Scaling of the infrastructure on which the application is run

Basically, it is about delegating tasks to the provider of the Serverless technology. In this case, the cloud provider, is who must guarantee that the stack on which our code runs is optimal, highly available, fault tolerant, offers the best possible performance and, very importantly, is billed for the time it has been in use, achieving a true pay-per-use.

Let's not forget that, in the case of virtual machines in the cloud, it is billed when the machine is up, regardless of whether the software it runs is receiving workload or not.

It is important to note that serverless does not only refer to computing, but is also applied to other cloud services where the same philosophy is applied, the so-called managed cloud services.

In the case of Amazon Web Services we have mainly the following:

• Computing (AWS Lambda or AWS Fargate)
• Storage (Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS)
• Data Management (Amazon Aurora Serverless or Amazon DynamoDB)
• Application Integration (Amazon API Gateway or Amazon SQS)

1 Pay-per-use

This is the most immediate advantage, since if a workload is executed only during a specific period of time (such as data update, datawarehouse loading or any other periodic workload), we will only be billed for the time we have used the service.

Apart from the immediate savings, there is a second saving derived from the non-existence of possible costs due to programming errors in the switching on and off of the environments, which often involve a large cost that is only detected when the monthly invoice is received from the supplier.

2 Elimination of ownership costs

Within this section we include the costs associated with the resources (people) that we dedicate to maintaining the virtual machine ecosystem. Tasks such as: infrastructure deployments, operating system patching, capacity planning to respond to peaks with optimal costs, planning power on/off for specific loads, etc.

Thus, since there is no infrastructure to manage, there will be no management costs.

3 High availability and fault tolerance included

While when we deploy an application on a stack that we manage, we also have to ensure the high availability and fault tolerance of the deployed architecture (auto-scaling groups, clusters, active-passive configurations, etc.). In the case of Serverless technologies, the cloud provider usually solves this part.

Again, the costs associated with deploying services or methodologies that guarantee certain SLAs in terms of availability and fault tolerance are reduced, and in many cases eliminated, since the cloud provider has solved these problems.