What Is AWS ?
In 2008 Amazon released the Lambda service, an experimental "purpose-built system for running code in response to events, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. On Amazon, we call this kind of system a "serverless application." A serverless application is an assembly of code that runs in response to events, like a cloud-based trigger for software applications. By describing the nature of these events and the behavior that follows, developers can design applications that respond quickly to new information.
Developers & Computing Accelerators
Developers benefit from AWS features like automated deployment, auto-scaling, and go-to-market pricing. Automated deployment saves developers time by allowing them to focus on building instead of building, testing, and deploying their applications. It also keeps them from the hassle of having to manage a whole IT department. With auto-scaling, developers can allocate specific AWS resources to ensure that their application scales as required and when needed. Go-to-market pricing means developers are charged according to their latency from when they deploy an application on AWS. This is also a time-saving service for developers as it makes it easier to accurately calculate resource costs and billing from the moment of deployment.
Common Misconstrued Ideas
The term serverless comes with its own set of misconceptions. The first of these is that serverless computing does not require servers. This is not true as AWS has never advertised it as such. Another misconception about serverless computing is that it makes applications scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure by default. Although these are all benefits of serverless computing, they do not come by default. Developers still need to know how to build their apps to achieve these benefits, just like they would with any other cloud environment.
Before serverless computing existed, applications were built on top of a large set of servers that hosted the code and function call response data. This meant that single points of failure were inevitable in such architectures, also known as monolithic architectures. The first attempts at building scalable and easy-to-maintain applications involved embedding the functionality in separate "microservices." A centralized IT team would then manage these microservices. The central IT team would then maintain the infrastructure to run these microservices, and the developers would focus on programming their applications.
Amazon is on its way to moving the entire IT industry forward. Their efforts in building a service that provides developers with a new way to build applications will have lasting effects that reverberate far and wide. To embrace this technological shift and capitalize on all of its benefits, developers must overcome the misconceptions associated with serverless computing. They must learn how to build applications using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to focus more of their time on delivering quality products instead of getting bogged down in details like server maintenance.
