Python for DevOps

Chapter 13. Serverless Technologies

Serverless is a term that generates a lot of buzz in the IT industry these days. As often happens with these kinds of terms, people have different opinions about what they actually mean. At face value, serverless implies a world where you do not need to worry about managing servers anymore. To some extent, this is true, but only for the developers who are using the functionality offered by serverless technologies. This chapter shows there is a lot of work that needs to happen behind the scenes for this magical world of no servers to come into being.

Many people equate the term serverless with Function as a Service (FaaS). This is partially true, and it mostly came about when AWS launched the Lambda service in 2015. AWS Lambdas are functions that can be run in the cloud without deploying a traditional server to host the functions. Hence the word serverless.

However, FaaS is not the only service that can be dubbed serverless. These days the Big Three public cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) all offer Containers as a Service (CaaS), which allows you to deploy full-blown Docker containers to their clouds without provisioning servers to host those containers. These services can also be called serverless. Examples of such services are AWS Fargate, Microsoft Azure Container Instances, and Google Cloud Run.

What are some use cases for serverless technologies? For FaaS technologies such as AWS Lambda, especially due to the event-driven ...