Serverless is considered the successor to containers. And while it’s heavily promoted as the next great thing, it’s not the best fit for every use case. Understanding the pitfalls and disadvantages of serverless will make it much easier to identify use cases that are a good fit. This post offers some technology perspectives on the maturity of serverless today.
First, note how we use the word serverless here. Serverless is a combination of “Function as a Service” (FaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS). Namely, those categories of cloud services where you don’t know what the servers look like. For example, RDS or Beanstalk are “servers managed by AWS,” where you still see the context of server(s). DynamoDB and S3 are just some kind of NoSQL and storage solution with an API, where you do not see the servers. Not seeing the servers means there’s no provisioning, hardening or maintenance involved, hence they are server “less.” A serverless platform works with “events.” Examples of events are the action behind a button on a website, backend processing of a mobile app, or the moment a picture is being uploaded to the cloud and the storage service triggers the function.