Serverless

Ulf Schneider, November 2023

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web with the Next computer shown on the picture. The first website, http://info.cern.ch/, went online Christmas 1990. Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd

A server must always be on. Therefore we see the sticker saying "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" It is a way of protecting the server.

In serverless are many servers, but they belong to someone else

The term serverless describes the developer experience

With serverless, developers will

  • not recognize servers,
  • they will not manage them,
  • and they will not interact with them in any way1

  1. ibm.com/topics/serverless ↩︎

Serverless can be seen as a current last step of the virtualization evolution

The virtualization evolution1

Hardware servers

↓

Virtual machines

↓

Containers

↓

Serverless

  1. ibm.com/blogs/nordic-msp/serverless/ ↩︎

Let´s examine the traits of each evolutionary step

Hardware servers

Hardware servers

have to be located somewhere (think of cabling, cooling, power-supply, and physical protection)

Hardware servers

have to be installed with software from the ground up

Hardware servers

have to be replaced by new hardware when they become too old

Hardware servers

have to be administered

Virtual machines

Virtual machines

decouple from the underlying hardware and operating system

Virtual machines

can be prepared once and installed multiple times on different hardware servers

Virtual machines

can be applied multiple times to a single hardware server

Virtual machines

have to be administered

Containers

Containers

can do what virtual machines can do

Containers

are more lightweight (cpu, storage) than virtual machines

Containers

can be distributed more easily than virtual machines

Containers

startup much faster than virtual machines

Containers

have to be administered

Serverless

Serverless

abstracts away any notion of servers and infrastructure

Serverless

does not require any kind of administration (or minimal)

Serverless

relies on a cloud provider offering the service (IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon)

Serverless

is payed by usage

Serverless

scales up and down automatically

Serverless

is reliable and fast around the globe

Serverless

puts the business logic into focus

Serverless covers

functions

storage

authentication

monitoring

alerting

Source: Edgar Landivar, https://x.com/elandivar/status/868321220453969920