By IT Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
Serverless computing is the ability to build and execute applications through the use of infrastructure provided by a third party via the cloud—no need to worry about managing bandwidth or configuring a set number of servers.
No server? No problem
Serverless computing doesn’t mean that software development and other operations happen without a server at all—it means the server is not operated, maintained, or provisioned by the same IT team that’s building out applications and executing models on the server. The server is provided by a third party vendor.
This practice, according to Cloudflare, can be advantageous for developers looking to reduce costs, since they are only charged for the services they are actively using, rather than needing to worry about paying for cloud servers and services they never utilize. Additionally, serverless architectures allow for automatic scaling of an application, since there is unlimited growth ability for a server space instead of a fixed amount of room.
Sounds perfect, right? But like so many other things in tech, there are security concerns when another company is remotely handling your infrastructure. One concern includes something called “multitenancy” happening, which is when several companies are running code on the serverless platform and affect the performance of developer’s code. It could also result in data exposure.
Not every developer or IT pro needs to consider serverless computing, but for those who want to quickly build applications or services without worrying too much about the backend, this could prove the ideal solution.
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