What are the reasons for the popularity of serverless computing and what is its value proposition?
The above information on what serverless and FaaS are gives a clear idea of the various benefits they provide to organizations:
Cost. You only pay for the service you use. There are no upfront costs for provisioning resources and no advanced capacity planning. Providers’ serverless offerings are typically metered on demand using an event-driven execution model. As a result, when a serverless function is idle, it costs nothing;
"Innate" scalability. Scaling is effortless and managed by the cloud provider;
Simplified code. With FaaS, you have the ability to load one function at a time or the entire application at once;
Fast time to market. FaaS supports iterative development, allowing applications to launch faster and making changes easier.
There are also several security benefits that can be gained from the FaaS model:
No need to manage OS patches. With FaaS, the bahamas whatsapp data platform manages the servers for you, eliminating the need to provision, manage, and monitor all the servers running. By abstracting the servers from you, FaaS also takes responsibility for patching them. However, note that providers patch vulnerabilities on their own schedule, so users must be aware of the state of the environment and the conditions in which their code is running.
Short-lived execution. One of the key requirements for running your code in a FaaS environment is that your function must be stateless and short-lived. In a FaaS environment, you don’t know which server is assigned to run your function. The platform provisions and removes servers at its discretion, “killing” them immediately after the function is executed. Most attacks first find and exploit a vulnerability, then install malware on the target machine. It must run silently to obtain as much information as possible, which takes some time. A serverless platform doesn’t give attackers the luxury of time, since most FaaS environments have a very short time limit for executing a function. With multiple reboots, a serverless environment eliminates any compromised server. Stateless and short-lived systems, including all FaaS functions, are less likely to be compromised at any given time.
Denial of Service (DoS) Resilience: The same scalability that helps with good demand can also help with its downside. Attackers often try to bring down systems by forcing the server to perform a large volume of memory-intensive actions, maximizing the server load, thereby depriving legitimate users of the application. These DoS attacks are naturally thwarted by the allocation of (supposedly) infinite serverless resources. An increase in requests, good or bad, will force the platform to allocate more servers. However, there is a cost to all of this, so monitoring of such activity should still be done.