What Is Serverless?

Chapter 3. How Do Serverless Platforms Work?

Now that we’ve talked about why serverless has become so important in the last few years (Chapter 1), and the strengths and advantages of serverless platforms (Chapter 2), it’s time to break down what the serverless experience looks like from the developer and architecture point of view. While writing and hosting functions on a serverless platform sounds easy, there are a handful of details you’ll need to deal with before you can focus on writing pure code. For that, we’ll take a quick tour of what you can expect from your serverless platform options. This chapter gives you a big-picture overview of the features of the reviewed serverless platforms. You can also check out the Quick Reference Guide in Chapter 4 to help you narrow down the features you’re looking for in a platform.

A General Guide to Serverless Platforms

All serverless platforms need to deal with the same seven architectural elements to operate properly. In this chapter we’ll cover seven of these elements:

• Supported languages

• Account setup and configuration

• Runtime security options

• API routing control

• Workflow and orchestration

• Scaling and reliability

• Metrics and monitoring

Let’s briefly discuss each of these elements.

Warning

Keep in mind that, no matter your serverless platform choice, you’ll need to deal with each of these elements. If the platform you select doesn’t support one (e.g., runtime security control), you’ll need to handle that yourself ...