There is a lot of buzz about the cloud. There are numerous options to host your applications or using pre-built softwares for your business needs.
So, there are different kinds of services available in the cloud.
- IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - In this you need to manage the servers yourself including the patches, updates, security and application hosting.
- PaaS (Platform as a Service) - So, you get the manged infrastructure by the cloud provider and you can focus on your application development
- SaaS (Software as a Service) - There are hundreds of thousands softwares available in the market that may fit to your needs directly and can be available in the cloud as well, be that a CMS like Wordpress, DotNetNuke, Joomla etc or an ecommerce solution like Prestashop, Opencart, Woocommerce, magento, NopCommerce or in softwares belonging to under domains and industries.
- But what if you need to create a custom application and still want the cost to be the least and infrastructure to be managed by someone else. You don't want to bother about fault tolerence and scalability, is there a solution available?
Yes, FaaS (Functions as a Service) which means you can create applications based on serverless architecture.
Is it really Serverless?
Not really. It simply means, that you don't need to worry about the infrastructure at all. It is a compute service that runs your code on demand based on various events.
You can also have your own FaaS using OpenFaaS
Okay! I get it. So what are the different use cases?
Well, there can be many:
- You may want to resize/process your images on your server.
- Need a payment service
- Sending bulk emails
- sms
- Push Notifications
Infact, you can take a look at this document
Nowthat we have a very basic understanding of what serverless architecture and functions as a service means, we'll play with Azure Functions in the next article.