Serverless cloud explained

It’s been around for a couple of years, but what exactly is serverless, and why should you be paying attention?

Put briefly, serverless computing is a fundamental shift in how we approach cloud infrastructure: we abstract it away from developers! This allows them to focus on what is fun and important: their code.

TL; DR: Serverless is faster, easier to use, and cheaper than traditional cloud

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Serverless cloud is a game-changer in modern software development, offering a powerful way to build scalable, cost-efficient applications without the burden of managing server infrastructure. By allowing developers to focus on writing code while the cloud provider handles server provisioning, scaling, and maintenance, serverless enables faster time-to-market and lower operational overhead.

Whether you're building a microservices architecture, creating real-time data processing pipelines, or simply looking to reduce infrastructure complexity, serverless cloud offers a flexible and powerful solution for many use cases.

The key benefits of serverless are:

Simplified Operations: No need to worry about server maintenance, patching, or capacity planning.
Automatic Scaling: The serverless platform automatically and instantly scales resources to handle fluctuating workloads. No quotas, no limits.
Increased Agility: Focus on writing code, not managing servers. Deploy and iterate faster.
Faster Time to Market: Streamline development and deployment, getting your applications to market quicker.
Reduced Costs: Pay only for what you use. No more wasted resources sitting idle.

What is serverless?

The term "serverless" can be a bit misleading. It doesn't mean servers are no longer involved. Instead, it signifies a shift in how users of cloud manage and pay for cloud computing server resources. In a serverless computing architecture, developers can build and run applications without needing to manage the underlying serverless infrastructure.

Think of it this way: in the early days of the web, you had to buy and maintain your own physical servers – a costly and complex undertaking. Then came cloud computing, where you could rent fixed **amounts of server resources, reducing initial costs but not necessarily ongoing costs, as one typically would over-provision to be sure that one would have enough allocated resources to handle traffic spikes and not hit any quotas, bringing down ones system. Over time it also didn’t reduce complexity, due to all the tools you needed to learn, to run your applications on cloud. Serverless takes cloud computing a step further, as you don’t have to specify which and how many server resources you need, and you only pay for the exact compute resources your application uses, when it uses them.

So instead of having to estimate your server capacity requirements upfront and paying for a fixed amount of bandwidth or a set number of compute server instances based on your estimate, you let the cloud provider automatically allocate the resources you need, and you're only charged based on the actual computation consumed. It's like switching from a fixed-rate phone plan to a pay-as-you-go model.

How does serverless work?

Serverless simplifies the backend. Developers write code, often in the form of functions, and deploy them to a serverless platform. These functions are triggered by events, such as a user clicking a button, a timer expiring, or data being uploaded. The serverless platform starts the triggered function, or service, and scales the resources needed to execute it.

Triggering a service that is not running, i.e. cold-starting it, quickly enough for users to not experience a delay or systems going down, is one of the most difficult things for serverless providers to get right. Most providers have either not solved it properly, resulting in slow cold-starts, or solved it by limiting and altering the programming languages, that their platforms can run. This results in users getting a poor experience, and/or developers having to learn and stay up to date with the adapted programming language, adding to all of the other things that eat up their cognitive capacity, and completely negating the benefits from not having to spend time and energy on setting up servers…

Merrymake has however succeeded in becoming the fastest cloud in Europe, with cascading cold-starts averaging around 150 milliseconds, without changing the programming languages, so developers experience less cognitive overload, becoming happier and more productive. And users get a faster and better experience.

Applications that benefit from serverless computing

Serverless computing architecture offers significant advantages more or less all types of applications, but particularly those with unpredictable or variable workloads. Below are some examples of application types that can benefit from serverless, where organizations will benefit from reduced operational overhead, improved scalability, and potentially lower costs due to the pay-per-use model of serverless platforms:

IoT applications: Internet of Things (IoT) applications are well-suited for serverless due to their often uneven demand and load patterns. Serverless computing can efficiently handle the sporadic nature of IoT data streams, scaling automatically to process incoming data from numerous devices. This approach is particularly beneficial for real-time data processing, predictive maintenance, and dynamic resource optimization in IoT ecosystems.
Batch processing: Serverless is ideal for batch processing applications that periodically complete high-volume, repetitive data jobs. These tasks, such as data backups, filtering, and sorting, can be executed efficiently in a serverless environment. The ability to scale massively when needed and incur no costs when inactive makes serverless particularly cost-effective for batch processing workloads.
Scheduled tasks: Applications requiring recurring or one-time scheduled tasks can leverage serverless computing effectively. Examples include: daily report generation, database maintenance routines, automated reminders or notifications, and periodic data synchronization. Many serverless platforms like provide a managed service for creating and running these scheduled tasks without the need for underlying infrastructure management. Some require developers to learn, use, and keep up with additional tools to schedule it, but Merrymake has it built in as a single command.
Integration and API backend services: Serverless architectures excel in scenarios involving backend APIs and integration across multiple systems. They allow developers to focus on writing code for specific functions without worrying about server management. This makes serverless ideal for e.g. building scalable API backends, implementing microservices architectures, and creating webhooks and event-driven integrations.
Event-driven applications: Applications that respond to events or triggers benefit greatly from serverless computing. Examples include chat bots, real-time data processing pipelines, automated workflow triggers, and content delivery and processing systems
Short-running, stateless tasks: Serverless is particularly effective for applications composed of short-running, stateless functions. These could include image and video processing, text and natural language processing, and data validation and transformation.

Serverless Architecture: key considerations

In a serverless architecture, applications are typically broken down into small, stateless functions that are triggered by events. These events could be anything from an HTTP request to a file upload or database update. The serverless platform automatically spins up the necessary resources to execute the function and shuts them down once the task is complete.

When designing a serverless architecture, it's important to consider factors such as:

Microservice-Oriented Design: To fully leverage the advantages of serverless computing, it's crucial to design your software using a microservice architecture rather than a monolithic structure. This allows for independent scaling of individual components, easier fault isolation, more efficient resource utilization, and faster development and deployment cycles, as teams can work on different services simultaneously.
Event-Driven Design: Serverless functions are triggered by events. Design your application to take advantage of this paradigm.
Stateless Functions: Serverless functions should ideally be stateless, meaning they don't store any data between invocations.

Serverless in action: popular platforms

The biggest serverless providers are all from the US: AWS Lambda, MS Azure Functions, Google Cloud Run, and CloudFlare. Other US alternatives exist, but the current geopolitical environment makes it relevant for European businesses to look for European serverless cloud providers that will remain GDPR-compliant.

Merrymake is, and it is also more technologically sophisticated than any of the US (and EU) clouds, providing additional benefits for organizations. The Merrymake platform has implemented serverless properly, with zero cold-start and normal programming languages. The platform is also infraless, meaning it abstracts away the tools required for service-to-service communication and coordination and replaces them with a simple, but strong message-passing interface. This allows developers to focus on their code, instead of tools. And it enables organizations to leapfrog their developer maturity by going full NoOps. But even if you stick with DevOps for now, Merrymake still gives you happier and more productive developers, which results in shorter time-to-market and lower failure recovery time.