A Technology Backgrounder to Serverless Architecture - A Whitepaper by RapidValue

A Technology Backgrounder to Serverless Architecture
- The Emerging Trend in Cloud
1
A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions
A TECHNOLOGY BACKGROUNDER TO
SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE
©RapidValue Solutions

2
Index
04 Use Cases of Serverless
05 Comparison of Serverless Frameworks
02
01
Introducing Serverless: The Buzzword in the Cloud-Native Space
Introduction
06 AWS Lambda: The Serverless Computing Service
07 AWS Serverless Platform
13 Lambda Pricing Example
15 Authors
14 Benefits of Serverless Architecture
16 About RapidValue
15 Conclusion

1
Introduction
The concept of serverless architecture may not be very new but lately, it has been observed to be an emerging
trend in the cloud. The reason behind this is the simple fact that it has simplified life for developers by providing
them with ample time to code instead of using it to set up servers. The servers are set up by the cloud service
providers and this eliminates the need for managing anything else except for the environment in which it has
to execute. The benefits of employing serverless architecture are being talked about and businesses are on an
endeavor to leverage the function’s code that has to be uploaded along with it configuring it for maximum
output. This whitepaper attempts to elaborate on the concept of serverless and its advantages with reference
to our experience from working with serverless technology.

2
Introducing Serverless:
The Buzzword in the Cloud-Native Space
Serverless is a framework that enables the process of deploying applications to be hassle-free. While some
people misunderstand that serverless architecture refers to the absence of servers, it’s not so. The servers
do exist but are not managed by us because, the cloud providers undertake the function of providing and
maintaining servers and these servers last in stateless ephemeral containers, fully managed by the cloud
vendor. The April 2018 report by Gartner states that by 2020 more than 20% of global enterprises will have
deployed serverless computing. Serverless has also emerged as the fastest-growing segment by outrunning
containers-as-a-service according to a report by RightScale. These statistics show that the hype around
serverless is based on its efficiency and capability to transform the future.
Given below is the stats as released by Google Trends on the interest over time regarding serverless.
100
75
50
25
0
Nov15, 2015 Oct16, 2016 Sep17, 2017 Aug19, 2018
Serverless has been an added benefit for those who had moved their business from traditional practices to
cloud. A recent report states that the market could grow from $4.25bn in 2018 to $14.93bn in 2023. The
fact that cloud providers are investing heavily on it shows that serverless is bound to create a remarkable
disruption in the coming years.

3
The four main advantages of serverless are as follows:
• Increased developer productivity: Developers can utilize the time spent in setting up a server to focus on
the optimization of other areas.
• Adjustable capacity and auto-scaling: The provision to scale individual functions instead of scaling the
entire app.
• Cost-effective: It has the pay-as-you-go feature where one needs to pay only for the services that have been
used and not when the system had been idle.
• Improved user experience: With no servers to manage, developers focus on enhancing the features rather
than the infrastructure and this ultimately results in better user experience.

4
Use Cases of Serverless
With its numerous benefits, serverless framework finds its application in various areas such as building web
applications, data processing and so on. Let’s take a look at some of its prominent use cases.
• Web Applications: With serverless, it is possible to build web applications that can handle peak loads by
scaling accordingly even if the load is unexpected. Also when there is no traffic, it costs almost nothing.
Serverless also allows applications to be multilingual without getting locked into using the same language
as their legacy software.
• Backends: Serverless enables the creation of highly secure, available and perfectly scalable backends. In
the case of media and log processing, it becomes simpler to process compute-heavy workloads without
the complexity of building multithreaded systems or manually scaling compute fleets.
• Data Processing: Clickstream and other near real-time streaming data processes are taken care of by
serverless. Big Data, high-speed video transcoding, stock trade analysis, and compute-intensive Monte
Carlo simulations for loan applications are some of the other data processing use cases of serverless.
• Chatbots: Serverless has made it easier to build and scale chatbots and power the chatbot logic. The ability
of serverless functions to automatically scale when there is an influx of requests makes it the best choice
to host a chatbot. Also serverless allows one to move between other cloud services offered by the same
provider. With chatbots being put widely in use, one could choose from different serverless technologies
to simplify the process of building and maintaining a chatbot.
• IT Automation: Serverless functions could be attached to alarms and monitors to provide customization
when required. Cron jobs could be handled easily using the serverless framework as in the case of AWS
where Lambda is combined with CloudWatch events to execute a Cron job. With modern applications
being replicated, serverless reduces the extent of complexity involved in writing Cron jobs.

5
Some of the available serverless frameworks in the market are from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
The serverless framework of AWS is called Lambda Function, that of Azure and Google Cloud are called Azure
Function and Google Cloud Function respectively. Here is a comparison of these three frameworks and their
offerings.
Though there have been other serverless frameworks in the market, AWS Lamba has managed to retain its
position in the top as the most widely adopted serverless service. Thus, this whitepaper focuses on AWS and
its serverless services based on our experience of working with it.
Comparison of Serverless Frameworks
AWS Lambda Function Google Cloud Function Microsoft Azure Function
Origin
Billing Model
Max Function Memory
Max No. of Functions &
Concurrent Execution
Supported Languages
Event-driven Architecture
Scalability & Availability
Deployment
2014
Pay-as-you-go
3008 MB
500 and 3000 instances
which varies per region
Java, Go, PowerShell,
Node.js, C#, Python,
and Ruby code
S3,SNS, SES, Cloud watch,
Code commit, Alexa, Load
Balancer, API Gateway,
Dynamo DB, Kinesis
1,000 number of functions
that can be deployed per
project
JavaScript (Node.js),
Python, and Go
Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud
storage, Http, Stack driver
logging & Firebase
A single function app only
scales up to a maximum of
200 instances
Java, PowerShell, C#,
Python, Java Script, Type
Script and F#
Azure & 3rd party services
Auto scaling
AWS serverless
application model
2016
Pay-as-you-go
2048 MB
Auto scaling
Uploading an archive
2016
Pay-per-execution
14 GB
Auto scaling
Rest API, Msbuild.exe, kudu,
Git Integration

6
Amazon has been one of the most sought after cloud service provider and offers several other features along
with the cloud. One such feature is its serverless platform and as the AWS Lambda product page states, it “lets
you run code without provisioning or managing servers". What sets it apart from other application frameworks
is the fact that it manages both the infrastructure and the code and also supports multiple programming
languages like Java, Python and the like. Introduced in 2014, AWS Lambda executes code when driven by an
event trigger and thus could be called as an event-driven computing platform. One need not pay when the
system is idle and has to only pay for the time consumed. Lambda supports use cases such as updates to
DynamoDB tables, image or object uploads to Amazon S3, responding to website clicks or reacting to sensor
readings from an IoT connected device.
The workflow of AWS Lambda is as follows:
AWS Lambda: The Serverless Computing Service
Upload your code to AWS
Lambda or White code in
Lambda's code editor.
Lambda runs your code
only when triggered, using
only the compute resources
needed.
Setup your code to trigger
from other AWS services,
HTTP endpoints,
or in-app activity.
Just pay for the compute
time you use.
AWS Lambda

7
Alongside Lambda, Amazon also provides numerous fully managed services that can be used to build and
run serverless applications. From storage to developer tooling, AWS takes care of functions that allows one to
focus more on product innovation. The several services and their workflows are as follows:
Amazon Simple Storage Service, otherwise known as Amazon S3, helps in storing any amount of data that
could be retrieved anytime from anywhere on the web. The storage system is very durable and highly secure
and makes web-scale computing easier for developers. The use cases of Amazon S3 include storing data for
websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, enterprise applications, Big Data analytics, archive, and
IoT devices. It provides simple, scalable, elastic file storage through the ‘Amazon Elastic File System’. As files
are added and removed, it grows and shrinks as per the demand. The workflow of Amazon S3 is as follows:
AWS Serverless Platform
1. Storage
Specify your target
objects by using an
S3 inventory report
(listing objects
in an S3 bucket
or with a specific
prefix) or providing
your own list of
target S3 objects.
In the S3 Management
Console, select an API
action from the
pre-populated menu
to run across your
target S3 objects.
You can request common API
actions, such as copying objects
between buckets, replacing object
tag sets, or restoring archived
objects from Amazon Glacier.
S3 Batch Operation
automatically manages
retries and displays object-
level progress. It also sends
notifications and delivers
completion reports when
requested changes are made
to your target S3 objects.
You can also choose to
invoke an AWS Lambda
function to execue
more complex operatios
on your S3 objects, such
as processing data and
transcoding images.
Amazon S3
AWS Lambda
S3 BATCH
OPERATIONS
Your requested
actions are made
across your target S3
objects.
Amazon S3

8
The document database is called Amazon DynamoDB, which is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service
that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. As the Amazon webpage states, DynamoDB
is efficient enough to handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and also support peaks of more than
20 million requests per second. DynamoDB helps in building powerful web applications, interactive mobile
apps, and flexible and reusable microservices. Another service is the Amazon Aurora Serverless which is a part
of the Amazon Relational Database Service. It is an auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora where the
database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your application's
needs.
Here is a sample workflow of how DyanamoDB helps in building a web application.
2. Data Stores
Front-end code
for weather app
hosted in S3
User clicks link to get
local weather
information
App makes REST API
call to endpoint
Lambda is
triggered
Lambda runs code to retrieve local
weather information and returns data
back to user
Amazon S3 API Gateway
Weather Application
DYNAMO DB

9
For developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale, Amazon has a feature
called the Amazon API Gateway. One could easily create ‘REST’ and WebSocket APIs which would act as
the ‘front door’ for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from the backend services.
These backend services could include the workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, any web
application or real-time communication applications. API Gateway helps in testing and releasing new
versions by allowing to run multiple versions of the same API simultaneously. Allowing to process thousands
of concurrent API calls and handling traffic management, the API Gateway also reduces cost wherein one
only needs to pay for the API calls received and the amount of data transferred out.
This is how the API Gateway works
3. API Proxy
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon
CloudWatch
API Gateway
Catch
Private Applications
Private Applications
Connected Users and
Streaming Dashboards
Web and Mobile
Applications
VPC and On-Premises
VPC and On-Premises
Data Center
IoT Devices
Create, publish,
maintain, moitor,
and secure APIs
at any scale
AWS Lambda Amazon EC2
Amazon Kinesis Amazon Dynamo DB
Other Web Services Publicly accessible
endpoints

10
Amazon offers services such as Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, AWS AppSync, and Amazon EventBridge. The
Amazon Simple Notification Service otherwise known as Amazon SNS helps publisher systems to send out
messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing. It also helps in sending out
notifications to end-users through email, mobile push, and SMS. It is highly durable, secure, available, and
also easy to use. Also, another service called Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) helps to send, store, and
receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing them. SQS enables one to
decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. For simplifying the process
of application development, there exists AWS AppSync that helps in creating a flexible API to securely access,
manipulate and combine data from one or more data sources. To connect applications easily using data
from one’s own applications, SaaS applications, and AWS services, Amazon has a serverless event bus called
the Amazon EventBridge. The process of building event-driven applications is made easier with EventBridge
as it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error handling.
Here is a sample diagram explaining how Amazon SNS works
4. Application Integration
Amazon SNS
AWS Lambda
AWS SQS
HTTP/S
Subscribers
SNS TopicPublisher Message Filtering
& Fanout Receive messages in
subscribing serverless
functions, queues,
microservices and
more
Decouple message
publishers from
subscribers with topics
Publish messges from
distributed systems,
microservices and
other AWS services
Fully-managed pub/
sub messaging
and event-driven
computing service
Filter messages
according to
subscription filter
policies and deliver
them to subscribers

11
AWS StepFunctions aids in application development by translating your workflow into an easy to understand
state machine diagram. These workflows are basically made up of a series of steps, with the output of one
step acting as the input of the next. When multiple AWS services are coordinated into serverless workflows,
the process of building and updating apps become quicker and this is achieved by StepFunctions. Each step
of execution can be monitored making it easy to identify and rectify problems.
The workflow of Amazon StepFunctions is as follows:
5. Orchestration
Amazon Step Functions
Fully-managed pub/
sub messaging
and event-driven
computing service
Configure
Define your workflow
as a series of steps
such as tasks choices,
parallel execution and
timeouts
Populate
Connect tasks to code
hosted in functions
and containers,
instances and on-
premises servers
Run
Provide any needed
input and run your
workflow as many
times as needed, for
upto one year
Evolve
Swap out tasks,
change the order of
steps or added new
steps - all without
changing the code

12
Amazon Athena and Amazon Kinesis are services that focus on simplifying data streaming and analysis.
Athena, an interactive query service makes it easy for anyone with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale
datasets present in S3. With Athena, there is no infrastructure involved as it is serverless and also one needs
to pay only for the queries that are run. To collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data, Amazon
provides Kinesis that allows to cost-effectively process streaming data and also allows one to choose the tools
that are fit for the application. It processes and analyzes data as it is received and does not wait for all data to
be collected before starting to process. Some of its use cases include securely streaming video from camera-
equipped devices in homes, offices, factories, and public places to AWS.
To speed up the process of developing serverless applications, Amazon provides developers with particular
frameworks, deployment tools, SDKs, IDE plugins, and monitoring solutions. This aids in rapidly building,
testing, deploying and monitoring serverless applications.
6. Analytics
7. Developer Tooling

13
If you allocated 512 MB of memory to your function, executed it 3 million times in one month, and it ran for
1 second each time, your charges would be calculated as follows:
Monthly compute charges
The monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB and the free tier provides 400,000 GB
Total compute (seconds) = 3M * (1s) = 3,000,000 seconds
Total compute (GB) = 3,000,000 * 512MB/1024 = 1,500,000 GB
Total compute – Free tier compute = Monthly billable compute GB
1,500,000 GB – 400,000 free tier GB = 1,100,000 GB
Monthly compute charges = 1,100,000 * $0.00001667 = $18.34
Monthly request charges
The monthly request price is $0.20 per 1 million requests and the free tier provides 1M requests per month.
Total requests – Free tier requests = Monthly billable requests
3M requests – 1M free tier requests = 2M Monthly billable requests
Monthly request charges = 2M * $0.2/M = $0.40
Total monthly charges
Total charges = Compute charges + Request charges = $18.34 + $0.40 = $18.74 per month
Lambda Pricing Example

14
As mentioned earlier, employing serverless architecture has its own set of advantages such as being cost-
efficient and scalable. Some of the other benefits offered by serverless are as follows,
Benefits of Serverless Architecture
• Server Management is Unnecessary: The fact that in the case of serverless, servers are set up and managed
by the cloud provider and not by us is a major advantage. It helps in reducing cost, time and effort. This
provides developers with the freedom to focus more on their applications without being held back by
server management. It also saves the time used for detecting infrastructure pitfalls.
• Lesser Time-to-market: Continuing from the previous point, the fact that the serverless framework saves
time for developers results in products hitting the market faster than expected. Rather than spending
weeks or months in developing an application, serverless enables developers to create one in days or
sometimes even within hours.
• Improved Scalability: Scalability is one of the prominent advantages that has made organizations switch
to the cloud. A successful application needs to be ready to handle a huge influx of data and serverless
ensures this with its flexible scaling. As the app grows, the system accommodates the growth and if it’s
not successful then infrastructure is not provisioned. This ensures that one stays prepared when there is a
sudden requirement for infrastructure and also that no infrastructure goes to waste.
• Increased Efficiency: It is evident from the above-mentioned points that serverless enables apps to run
more efficiently than when traditional methods are employed. With serverless, developers are free from
worrying about matters like scaling, infrastructure, DevOps, capacity planning, and the like. Also, the pay
as you go feature ensures that one only pays for the time the system was in use and this, in turn, reduces
the amount of waste generated.
• Enhanced Latency: For an app to perform equally well for all its users it must have access points on a
global scale. Serverless ensures that there exists a serverless node close to the user that makes scaling
uncomplicated. In the case of the traditional framework, the request has to travel to the place where the
server has been hosted and will create latencies that can lead to poor user experiences. This can be tackled
through the serverless framework that ensures better latency and experience.

15
Authors
Avinash Thakur Amritha Nampalat
Global Head- Digital Transformation
& Cloud Services
RapidValue
Marketing Executive
RapidValue
If you’d like to know more about Serverless Architecture, please reach out to us at
contactus@rapidvaluesolutions.com
15
Conclusion
Since 2018, serverless has been one of the most sought-after cloud services owing to its scalability
and reliability. The fact that the servers are handled by the cloud provider is both a boon and a
bane. While the whitepaper discusses the pros of it, the cons are that the lack of control over the
server makes it difficult to expand or modify resources manually. Also, the use of third-party APIs
might sometimes result in vendor lock-in or other security concerns. That said, these limitations
do not stop it on its trajectory upward and might even not exist anymore in the future with cloud
providers bringing in more changes with each passing year. Some of the limitations of serverless
are same as that of cloud but that did not stop the latter from being widely adopted and with
several influential companies adopting serverless, its future looks promising and bright.

16
Disclaimer:
This document contains information that is confidential and proprietary to RapidValue Solutions Inc. No part of it may be used,
circulated, quoted, or reproduced for distribution outside RapidValue. If you are not the intended recipient of this report, you are
hereby notified that the use, circulation, quoting, or reproducing of this report is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful.
A global leader in digital transformation for enterprise providing end-to-end
mobility, omni-channel, IoT and cloud solutions. Armed with a large team of
experts in consulting, UX design, application development, integration and testing,
along with experience delivering projects worldwide, in mobility and cloud, we
offer a wide range of services across industry verticals. We deliver services to
the world’s top brands, fortune 1000 companies, Multinational companies and
emerging startups. We have offices in the United States, the United Kingdom,
Germany and India.
www.rapidvaluesolutions.com
+1 877.643.1850
www.rapidvaluesolutions.com/blog
contactus@rapidvaluesolutions.com
OCTOBER, 2019©RapidValue Solutions

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