Serverless 101 with Node.js
Serverless is about two things
- Serverless was first used to describe applications that significantly or fully depend on 3rd party applications / services (‘in the cloud’) to manage server-side logic and state. These are typically ‘rich client’ applications (think single page web apps, or mobile apps) that use the vast ecosystem of cloud accessible databases (like Parse, Firebase), authentication services (Auth0, AWS Cognito), etc. These types of services have been previously described as ‘(Mobile) Backend as a Service’, and I’ll be using ‘BaaS’ as a shorthand in the rest of this article.
FAAS
Function-as-a-Service
- tends involve invoking short-lived functions (Lambda has a default 1-sec timeout)
- tends to be ad-hoc/event-driven such as responding to webhooks
- should deal gracefully with spikes in traffic
- despite name, runs on servers backed by a fluid, non-deterministic infrastructure
- when working well makes the complex appear simple
FaaS Providers
AWS Lambda
Google Cloud Functions
Change existing express applications into serverless ones!
AWS Lambda @ Netguru