Serverless apps by Fastest Solution
How would you like to run your applications without worrying about any server infrastructure, be able to respond to performance spikes in seconds (or even less), and pay for it all based on actual usage of individual services? Serverless computing services make all this possible. No more servers!
Of course, you can't do it without servers, but from the user's point of view, the servers are hidden, you don't pay anything for them, and most importantly, you don't have to take care of them.
What is serverless computing
Simply put, serverless computing is about providing certain platform features in the form of a pay per use model. In the case of standard infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or PaaS services, you typically pay for a certain "size " of the service, usually defined by performance (2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM). In the case of serverless computing, on the other hand, you pay for the "volume " of use of the service:
- how often you run a business function,
- how many milliseconds of CPU time a single execution of your application consumes,
- how many messages your apps have exchanged,
- how many resources your application has used.
In the context of Cloud computing, we can meet the abbreviation FaaS, i.e. Function as a Service.
Nowadays it is possible to draw various kinds of services in the form of serverless computing:
- Services for running applications, code or even Kubernetes
- Database services, both standard relational databases and object databases
- Different integration services, notification services, queue processing services or APIs
- AI and machine learning, text recognition, video analysis or even interactive chat services
- So we can think of serverless computing as a pool of resources that are available to me, and every time I use a resource, I pay for it.
Advantages of serverless versus server-based solutions
- you do not purchase or rent servers, hosting
- you do not pay fixed amounts for the operation of the solution, especially during the time when your product is not in use (normally, for web applications, there are fewer users at night than during the day)
- Scalability - are you paying an incredible amount of money for HW and just because last Christmas or COVID you had your e-shop slow or crashed completely? With our solution, that won't happen to you. The solution will be just as fast even if it serves a thousand or a million users.
How much does it cost to run a serverless application?
The cost of running software on a serverless architecture depends on what tasks the solution is supposed to perform. As an example, we can use an e-shop that can be statically pre-generated and distributed using AWS S3 and CDN. Such a solution needs static storage and simple AWS Lambda functions to take care of content pre-generation.
Monthly operation of such a solution can cost even 0 USD / month, as AWS provides generous free-tier limits in the Czech market. For an e-shop with thousands of products, tens of cents to units of dollars per month of operation can already appear on the invoice.
How does the transition of clouds to serverless architecture help?
This transition has safety benefits and also reduces financial costs and carbon footprint. That's why at Fastest Solution we develop applications primarily in a serverless cloud. We are one of the first in the Czech Republic to do this for both web and mobile applications. For example, for a client in the energy sector, we developed a serverless mobile application for customer service. This means that the server part runs in the cloud without the need for expensive, huge and noisy physical servers. So the app operator doesn't have to buy servers or hardware and worry about maintaining them. The cloud takes care of everything. The client only pays for the service they use. This is a major advantage, so the serverless model has a great future, even though it is a novelty in the Czech Republic.
