There are a number of advantages that are provided by a move to serverless architecture, such as the following:
- Reduced development effort through the integration of third-party services
- Less operational complexity, because now the organization doesn't need to take care of the infrastructure
- Improved security, since the individual functions execute in their own separate containers, which helps us to keep the different functions from interfering with each other
- Improved scalability of the application
The use of Backend as a Service (BaaS) helps in the creation of applications by providing common set of functionality through the integration of the APIs. These services are hosted by a third-party provider,thereby reducing the effort that the application developers will have to expend in rebuilding them in their application from scratch.
The API gateway in a serverless architecture maps the API endpoints to a function in the backend. These API endpoints can then be called by the clients when a particular event occurs, invoking the backend function.
There are certain reasons why an application cannot be ported successfully to a serverless architecture. These reasons are as follows:
- The use of a technology stack that may not be supported by the serverless infrastructure provider
- Applications that need to store the state of the request processing to generate correct results
- A tightly coupled code base that makes it hard to define individual methods
- Some components of the application taking an extremely long time to execute