What is Serverless computing?
Serverless computing, or serverless for short, is where you can perform computing operations using one of the cloud platform providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. They perform the action for you and charge you for the use of their computers. This means you don’t have to own any of your own servers, hence serverless.
Advantages
There are a lot of advantages to serverless but here are the main ones:
You don’t have to own a server.
Servers can cost thousands to buy and then you’ve got to store, maintain and upgrade it over time. With serverless, you have none of the upfront costs or maintenance work. This means you can create a service for almost nothing which is great for minimum viable products.
Automatic scaling and pay for what you use.
These two are very closely linked. If you have just started a project and you have the occasional user, you only pay for when your system is running.
If you have 5 customers an hour performing an action that takes 20s, you only pay for 100s of compute time an hour.
Scaling automatically becomes useful when you build a larger customer base and have 100 people using your service at some times of the day. You’ll automatically have enough compute power to serve them all but when you have only a few customers at 2am, you go back to paying for lower resources.
Lots of other benefits
As well as the main benefits, you get the advantages of: faster deployment, better architecture flexibility, reduced time to feature, increased portability, language flexibility and many more. The list of these is also growing as the technology matures and people build tools to make the most of it.
Serverless Use In Business
These advantages make serverless a very attractive prospect for all companies from small startups to large multinationals. This can be seen in the research found that 78% of companies are planning to use serverless technology in the next 18 months.
How do I get Started?
If you want to take advantage of this crazy growth sector, now is the best time to learn to build and deploy serverless services. To help you take your first steps, I’ve created a Full-stack Serverless course where we’ll build and deploy a serverless application, with a dynamic React front end and a Node back end.
We will go through every step needed to create and deploy our own landing page app.
- AWS setup with Serverless
- Uploading Folders to S3 with Serverless
- Creating and hosting a React App in S3
- AWS Lambdas and API Gateway — creation and deployment
- Sending Emails using AWS Simple Email Service
If you want to take the next step in your career, Sign up to the course here or find out more about serverless here.