Microservices and Serverless architecture has been gaining a lot of traction in the recent past. While Microservices ensure fault isolation, continuous development & deployment, and manages codebase seamlessly; Serverless architecture takes care of infra, server, and cost optimization.
Although, both the architectures serve a different purpose, at a different level of development, they can be combined to have a performance-oriented solution, which is optimized for cost and infra efficiency. The architecture thus developed is known as serverless microservices.
What is the serverless microservices approach to development? What are the benefits of going serverless? What’s the difference between microservices and serverless? The later segment introduces you to serverless microservices architecture and its surefire benefits for software development.
What is Microservices Architecture?
Microservices is a modular approach to software development. Herein, the software is divided into an independent group of components that run each application process as a service. Microservices enables continuous delivery and deployment of large, complex applications. Because the size of service is quite small and loosely coupled, it is easy to test the service and deploy it faster, without affecting the rest of the services or application.
Another reason why Microservices is one of the major trends in software development domain is improved fault isolation. Even if a service misbehaves or fails, the rest of the services will stay unaffected and will continue to receive /respond to user requests.
Microservices architecture eliminates dependency on a specific technology (languages or frameworks) to build an application. Thus, updating or rewriting service with different technology is possible.
READ MORE: Benefits of Microservices over Monolithic Architecture
What is Serverless Architecture?
Serverless, often referred to as serverless application is the one that doesn’t require you to provision or manage any servers. This shifts the focus on the core product and business logic instead of responsibilities like OS access control, right-sizing, provisioning, scaling and availability. When you opt for serverless architecture for software, the cloud service provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) manages these responsibilities for you.
In a traditional approach, you keep paying for dedicated cloud servers, even if they are running idle or not serving any traffic. And because you want to keep the application up and running, turning-off the servers is certainly not an option which ultimately adds up to the operational cost.
- With Serverless solutions, you only pay for the compute time you consume. There are no charges when the code is not running.
- With serverless architecture, you don’t require any upfront planning to scale, unlike dedicated servers. Serverless allows you to scale the application automatically (memory, throughput), as the demand strikes rather than units of individual servers.
- Serverless solutions do not require any environment configuration. Therefore, you don’t need a dedicated sysadmin for installation and configuration of the application environment.
What is Serverless Microservices?
Consider an eCommerce platform built using Microservices. Different services, such as product catalog, cart service, order management, payment etc. will work individually. While the traffic on website/app remains consistent in usual days, it shoots up during the sale days.
In this case, instead of managing the infrastructure, services, or servers to take the load and deal with continuous fluctuations, the better solution is to opt for a serverless architecture.
Relying upon serverless solution means your cloud service provider will take care of scaling the platform as the demand strikes. Also, you have to pay only for the services that are used by the customer on the platform. That means, no need to waste resources on services that aren’t used by the visitors on website.
Planning to Rearchitect your Software Application?
So far, you must have acknowledged the benefits of adopting a serverless microservices architecture. If you're planning to modernize your legacy software or build a new one following this development approach, connect to our cloud expert, Gaurav Sharma to know more.
