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Until about 2017, the cloud was going to replace all on-premises data centers. As it turns out, however, the cloud has not replaced all on-premises data centers. Why not? Based on the paper under review, one potential answer is because containers in the cloud are still too much like “serverfull” computing. Developers must still create and manage what appear to be virtual machines, including:
- Machine level redundancy, including georedundancy
- Load balancing and request routing
- Scaling up and down based on load
- Monitoring and logging
- System upgrades and security
- Migration to new instances
Serverless solves these problems by placing applications directly onto the cloud, or rather a set of libraries within the cloud.
Jonas, Eric, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Chia-Che Tsai, Anurag Khandelwal, Qifan Pu, Vaishaal Shankar, et al. “Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing.” ArXiv:1902.03383 [Cs], February 9, 2019. http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03383.
The authors define serverless by contrasting it with serverfull computing. While software is run based on an event in serverless, software runs until stopped in a cloud environment. While an application does not have a maximum run time in a serverfull environment, there is some maximum set by the provider in a serverless Continue reading