What is serverless?
When someone asks you to develop a solution, the last thing they usually care about is how the infrastructure will work. The truth is, even for developers, the most important thing about infrastructure is that it simply works well.
Considering this reality, the possibility of having a cloud provider that dynamically manages server allocation and provisioning, leaving the underlying infrastructure to the provider, might be the best scenario.
That is what serverless architecture promises: a model we can use to build and run applications and services without having to manage the underlying infrastructure ourselves! This approach abstracts server management entirely, allowing developers to focus on their code.
The first cloud solution provider that presented this concept was Amazon, with the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014. After that, Microsoft and Google also provided similar solutions with Microsoft Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. As we mentioned before, the focus of this book will be Azure Functions.
There are many advantages that we can consider for using serverless computing. The fact that you do not have to worry about scaling can be considered the main one. Additionally, the cloud solution provider maintains the reliability and security of the environment. Besides that, with this approach, you have the option to pay as you go, so you only pay for what you use, enabling a sustainable model of growth.
Serverless can also be considered a good approach for accelerating software development since you only focus on the code needed to deliver that program. On the other hand, you may have difficulty overseeing a considerable number of functions, so this organization needs to be well handed to not cause problems while creating a solution with many functions.
Since the introduction of serverless, various kinds of functions have been created. These functions act as triggers that are used to start processing. As soon as the function is triggered, the execution can be done in different programming languages.
Now, let us check whether functions can be considered microservices or not.
