 | This article may be unbalanced toward certain viewpoints.(January 2025) |
Function as a service is a "platform-level cloud capability" that enables its users "to build and manage microservices applications with low initial investment for scalability," according to ISO/IEC 22123-2. [1]
Function as a Service is a subset of the serverless computing ecosystem. [2]
The "Grain of Sand Anti-pattern" refers to the creation of excessively small components (e.g., functions) within a system, often resulting in increased complexity, operational overhead, and performance inefficiencies. [3] "Lambda Pinball" is a related anti-pattern that can occur in serverless architectures when functions (e.g., AWS Lambda, Azure Functions) excessively invoke each other in fragmented chains, leading to latency, debugging and testing challenges, and reduced observability. [4] These anti-patterns are associated with the formation of a distributed monolith.
These anti-patterns are often addressed through the application of clear domain boundaries, which distinguish between public and published interfaces. [4] [5] Public interfaces are technically accessible interfaces, such as methods, classes, API endpoints, or triggers, but they do not come with formal stability guarantees. In contrast, published interfaces involve an explicit stability contract, including formal versioning, thorough documentation, a defined deprecation policy, and often support for backward compatibility. Published interfaces may also require maintaining multiple versions simultaneously and adhering to formal deprecation processes when breaking changes are introduced. [5]
Fragmented chains of function calls are often observed in systems where serverless components (functions) interact with other resources in complex patterns, sometimes described as spaghetti architecture or a distributed monolith. In contrast, systems exhibiting clearer boundaries typically organize serverless components into cohesive groups, where internal public interfaces manage inter-component communication, and published interfaces define communication across group boundaries. This distinction highlights differences in stability guarantees and maintenance commitments, contributing to reduced dependency complexity. [4] [5]
Additionally, patterns associated with excessive serverless function chaining are sometimes addressed through architectural strategies that emphasize native service integrations instead of individual functions, a concept referred to as the functionless mindset. However, this approach is noted to involve a steeper learning curve, and integration limitations may vary even within the same cloud vendor ecosystem. [6]
Function as a service workloads may encounter migration obstacles due to service lock-in from tight vendor integrations. Hexagonal architecture can facilitate workload portability. [7]
Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. SOA is a good choice for system integration. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.
In software engineering, a connection pool is a cache of reusable database connections managed by the client or middleware. It reduces the overhead of opening and closing connections, improving performance and scalability in database applications.
In software engineering, a monolithic application is a single unified software application that is self-contained and independent from other applications, but typically lacks flexibility. There are advantages and disadvantages of building applications in a monolithic style of software architecture, depending on requirements. Monolith applications are relatively simple and have a low cost but their shortcomings are lack of elasticity, fault tolerance and scalability. Alternative styles to monolithic applications include multitier architectures, distributed computing and microservices. Despite their popularity in recent years, monolithic applications are still a good choice for applications with small team and little complexity. However, once it becomes too complex, you can consider refactoring it into microservices or a distributed application. Note that a monolithic application deployed on a single machine, may be performant enough for your current workload but it's less available, less durable, less changeable, less fine-tuned and less scalable than a well designed distributed system.
A message broker is an intermediary computer program module that translates a message from the formal messaging protocol of the sender to the formal messaging protocol of the receiver. Message brokers are elements in telecommunication or computer networks where software applications communicate by exchanging formally-defined messages. Message brokers are a building block of message-oriented middleware (MOM) but are typically not a replacement for traditional middleware like MOM and remote procedure call (RPC).
In information systems, applications architecture or application architecture is one of several architecture domains that form the pillars of an enterprise architecture (EA).
Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to ISO.
Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.
AppScale is a software company that offers cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, but AppScale GTS source code remains freely available to the open-source community.
Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It supports key-value and document data structures and is designed to handle a wide range of applications requiring scalability and performance.
Backend as a service (BaaS), sometimes also referred to as mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), is a service for providing web app and mobile app developers with a way to easily build a backend to their frontend applications. Features available include user management, push notifications, and integration with social networking services. These services are provided via the use of custom software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). BaaS is a relatively recent development in cloud computing, with most BaaS startups dating from 2011 or later. Some of the most popular service providers are AWS Amplify and Firebase.
Multicloud is a term with varying interpretations, generally referring to a system using multiple cloud computing providers. According to ISO/IEC 22123-1: "multi-cloud is a cloud deployment model in which a customer uses public cloud services provided by two or more cloud service providers". Multi-cloud can involve various deployment models, including public, private, and hybrid clouds, and multiple service models, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Multicloud incorporates workload, data, traffic and workflow portability options, exhibiting differing implementation complexities.
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, the project is now maintained by a worldwide community of contributors, and the trademark is held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application into a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services that communicate through lightweight protocols. This pattern is characterized by the ability to develop and deploy services independently, improving modularity, scalability, and adaptability. However, it introduces additional complexity, particularly in managing distributed systems and inter-service communication, making the initial implementation more challenging compared to a monolithic architecture.
AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless Function as a Service (FaaS) provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. It is designed to enable developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. It executes code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code. It was introduced on November 13, 2014.
"X as a service" is a phrasal template for any business model in which a product use is offered as a subscription-based service rather than as an artifact owned and maintained by the customer. Originating from the software as a service concept that appeared in the 2010s with the advent of cloud computing, the template has expanded to numerous offerings in the field of information technology and beyond it. The term XaaS can mean "anything as a service".
The Serverless Framework is a web framework written using Node.js. Serverless is the first framework developed for building applications on AWS Lambda, a serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. Currently, applications developed with Serverless can be deployed to other function as a service providers, including Microsoft Azure with Azure Functions, IBM Bluemix with IBM Cloud Functions based on Apache OpenWhisk, Google Cloud using Google Cloud Functions, Oracle Cloud using Oracle Fn, Kubeless based on Kubernetes, Spotinst and Webtask by Auth0.
Serverless computing is "a cloud service category in which the customer can use different cloud capability types without the customer having to provision, deploy and manage either hardware or software resources, other than providing customer application code or providing customer data. Serverless computing represents a form of virtualized computing." according to ISO/IEC 22123-2. Serverless computing is a broad ecosystem that includes the cloud provider, Function as a Service, managed services, tools, frameworks, engineers, stakeholders, and other interconnected elements, according to Sheen Brisals.
Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites.
IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.
