Serverless - First to market

There is nothing that simplifies our life as much as serverless does. It’s a popular technology. Every cloud provider has their own offering of functions as a service. There is even OpenFAAS, a kubernetes way of just running a simple function in the cloud. Even though serverless is marketed as web scale, we think that its power lies in the fact that it’s a simple way to run its code. By going high speed without compromising the deed, you can be the first on the market and monopolize it.

We, serverless developers are a big fans of rapidly prototyping stuff. By our philosophy, we’re similar to RoR developers. We want to build our software fast, test it in production, and see if we have product market fit. We value our time and believe that development is more expensive than server costs. We don’t mind paying an extra buck for hosting costs. At the end of the day we’ll save 100x in development costs. We’re aware how hard it is for our product to gain adoption. We think without verifying that our product works, all our development efforts are in vain. That is why we are serverless developers and masters.

Event driven architecture

Serverless is all about event driven architecture. It embraces it and puts it on steroids. It’s all about software architecture paradigm where you produce, detect and consume events. An event is considered a significant change in state. A good example of it is when car changes state from “sale” to “sold”.

When designing serverless system, the nice thing about it is that you can do loosely coupled functions. You usually end up with event emitters, event consumers and event channels. True power of serverless comes into play when you need to do horizontal scaling. Even though FAAS is usually hosting wise, more expensive than designing microservices. Due to its design, and constraints it puts on you it is really simple to scale it out.

Usually it is just a matter of turning knob and allow running 10x or a 100x parallel functions, your app instantly becomes “web scale”. Not to mention the bonus failure resistance you get. To summarize it is a powerful way of architecture and building interesting stuff. If you are a new person just starting building something consider using serverless in order to reduce your upfront costs.

Did you know

• There is a famous rap battle between serverless and containers by trek10.

Serverless pricing comparison

When it comes to running serverless. As you scale… hosting costs might hit you hard. Before getting to that point it might be good to re-evaluate possible solutions.

Usually at certain mark, when your load is consistent, running containers is significantly cheaper. But lets ignore that for the moment. There is also a pricing difference between various serverless services. Although there is a a difference between what you can do with lambda as opposed to what you can do with cloudflare workers… Cloudflare workers are three time cheaper than aws lambda.

Realistically, AWS Lambda is the most powerful FaaS but also one of the most expensive ones to run. When designing your next feature, system or an app, it might be wise to keep that in mind. Know that there is no perfect solution. There always must be a compromise. Trading some benefits for some flaws. With that in mind, know there is also a different philosophy. It looks beyond mere hosting costs.

Imagine all the money, all the users, all the iterations and feedback you are loosing by taking more time to develop your thing. Developing in machine resources optimized way can easily prolong your time to hit the market for at least a year. Are you willing to risk that time, pay the extra initial development cost, and risk somebody else being faster than you? That is the true power of serverless computing.

About Illustration

Even though Lambda from AWS is probably the most popular representation of serverless, we’ve decided to go with road runner for our developer tee. We think that road runner is a perfect illustration of serverless. For us serverless represents fast way of building stuff, hence a famous cartoon character.

With serverless you are a judge of how much you want to invest into development and how much you want to pay your hosting provider. That is the main reason why our road runner is dressed as a judge. We think, as you scale serverless, it is all about balancing which parts you want to build as machine efficient microservices and which parts you want to design using serverless functions. Hence our judicial scale. As you weight the pros and cons you usually realize how much you need to invest into developing something.

Serverless makes developing new features simple. It reduces the initial devolvement costs. That is why the scale is tilted on FaaS. And as far as quote goes we were inspired with rap battle. We think there is some truth about it. It’s all about going high speed without compromising the deed.