Function execution platforms really gained rise as more people got tired of setting up full containerized environments for simple code execution. The costs, overall maintenance, and cascading consequences of failures meant more people were looking for a lean context to execute one-off workers in the cloud. By Jesse Martin.
The industry really rose to notoriety when AWS introduced AWS Lambda, a lambda being an anonymous function, and the service being that promise, as a service - these are anonymized functions that are not bound to a calling context, but respond to discrete events and take discrete inputs. They’re simple to reason about, simple to call, and most of all, they’re drastically more affordable to run, lending themselves really well to “pay for compute time”, not “pay for standby” which containers need to do.
The article pays attention to:
- The pros and cons of FaaS
- Choosing a FaaS Provider
- Comparing FaaS providers
- AWS Lamdba
- Google Cloud functions
- Azure functions
- Vercel
- Gatsby Cloud functions
- Netlify functions
- Cloudflare Workers
- Fly.io
- Oracle Functions
- IBM Functions
- Tencent Cloud
- Alibaba Cloud
- Redhat Open Shift
- No-Code / Low-Code providers
Serverless execution is here to stay. With the rough 80⁄20 analysis method, serverless will be a dominant strategy for many companies that want to control costs, embrace low-op approaches to infrastructure, and focus on domain logic, not managing their own servers. Good read!
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