Cloud Services Without Servers: What's Behind It
Architecture and Governance, Thursday, October 5,2023
In cloud computing, commercial providers make computing resources available on demand to their customers over the Internet. This service is partly offered 'serverless', that is, without servers. How can that work? Computing resources without a server, isn't that like a restaurant without a kitchen?
'The term is misleading,' says computer science Professor Samuel Kounev from Julius-Maximilians-Universitat (JMU) Wurzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Because even serverless cloud services don't get by without servers.
In classical cloud computing, for example, a web shop rents computing resources from a cloud provider in the form of virtual machines (VMs). However, the shop itself remains responsible for the management of 'its' servers, that is, the VMs. It has to take care of security aspects as well as the avoidance of overload situations or the recovery from system failures.
The situation is different with serverless computing. Here, the cloud provider takes over responsibility for the complete server management. The cloud users can no longer even access the server, it remains hidden from them - hence the term 'serverless'.