How both of these differ ? Is serverless computing is the part of cloud computing ?
3 Answers
2
votes
Let's start from the early days of the internet:
In the early days of the web, anyone who wanted to build a web application had to own the physical hardware required to run a server, which is a cumbersome and expensive undertaking.
__ Cloudflare - What Is Serverless Computing? | Serverless Definition
So the main problem here was purchasing, maintaining, and keeping physical hardware which wasn't/isn't in both terms of time/money.
Cloud Computing
Then there was cloud computing where you would rent a remote server for a desired period of time (Pay-as-you-Go or monthly fee). and you wouldn't have the hassle of keeping physical storages and etc.
Let's read about Amazon Web Server and Microsoft Azure documents:
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
__ AWS - What is cloud computing?
Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.
__ Microsoft Azure - What is cloud computing?
Serverless Computing
According to Cloudflare's article about Serverless Computing:
Serverless computing is a method of providing backend services on an as-used basis. A serverless provider allows users to write and deploy code without the hassle of worrying about the underlying infrastructure. A company that gets backend services from a serverless vendor is charged based on their computation and do not have to reserve and pay for a fixed amount of bandwidth or number of servers, as the service is auto-scaling. Note that despite the name serverless, physical servers are still used but developers do not need to be aware of them.
And still, with cloud computing, there were some challenges with pricing and maintenance cost. With Serverless you don't need to worry about OS updates, Kernel patches, etc. And also you would be charged based on your CPU usage (CPU Time/Memory) and not a period of time like cloud computing would cost you. e.g. if you have 1 hour of computing per day for a year, cloud computing would cost you a year of renting a server meanwhile serverless computing would cost you only 365 hours and not an entire year!
0
votes
Cloud computing is a term that refers to several styles of delivering compute services. IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service is the most tangible style as it offers VMs or virtual machines where the consumer runs the operating system, the middleware and any applications running on the VM. This is a rough equivalent of running an application in a modern datacenter but with more automation.
Serverless computing is another style of cloud computing where the consumer is only concerned about the code being run. The cloud takes care of how the code is run and any performance and scalability needs automatically. The consumer has no need to manage the OS or middleware.
