Foundations of Scalable Systems

Chapter 8. Serverless Processing Systems

Scalable systems experience widely varying patterns of usage. For some applications, load may be high during business hours and low or nonexistent during nonbusiness hours. Other applications, for example, an online concert ticket sales system, might have low background traffic 99% of the time. But when tickets for a major series of shows are released, the demand can spike by 10,000 times the average load for a number of hours before dropping back down to normal levels.

Elastic load balancing, as described in Chapter 5, is one approach for handling these spikes. Another is serverless computing, which I’ll examine in this chapter.

The Attractions of Serverless

The transition of major organizational IT systems from on-premises to public cloud platforms deployments seems inexorable. Organizations from startups to government agencies to multinationals see clouds as digital transformation platforms and a foundational technology to improve business continuity.

Two of the great attractions of cloud platforms are their pay-as-you-go billing and ability to rapidly scale up (and down) virtual resources to meet fluctuating workloads and data volumes. This ability to scale, of course, doesn’t come for free. Your applications need to be architected to leverage the scalable services provided by cloud platforms. And of course, as I discussed in Chapter 1, cost and scale are indelibly connected. The more resources a system utilizes for extended periods, ...