Speed to market is the key to success and is possible with serverless backend. With serverless technologies, you will not need to worry about managing your servers. You will be able to dive straight into implementation.
Most cloud providers support Function as a Service, or FaaS, and it allows you to build a serverless backend in matters of minutes.
Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of FaaS.
Advantages of FaaS
It is cheap, really
An AWS Lambda costs as little as $0.20 per million requests and $0.0000166667 for every GB-second. This means you can build a microservice without burning a hole in your pocket.
Highly scalable
Every concurrent invocation will create a separate instance of the service. There is almost no limit to how much a FaaS can scale horizontally, except maybe your budget.
Disadvantages of FaaS
Cold starts
Every concurrent invocation initialises a new instance of the service. This will require time for it to initialise, also known as cold start. However, there are ways to avoid this. AWS has provisioned concurrency which helps to resolve cold starts with an additional cost. This will keep a specified number of instances warm.
Denial of Service
Because your architecture is highly scalable, you may be vulnerable to DoS. This might burn a hole in your pocket. Thankfully there is service level throttling when you reach the burst limit, thus reducing the damage. However, this might be an issue when you have a spike in legitimate traffic.
Give FaaS a try! You will fall in love with it as soon as you start using it.
Check out this article on how to build a microservice with FaaS.
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