FaaS – Getting Used to the Cloud Enterprise

For a couple of decades, we’ve known about SaaS (Software as a Service.)  And more recently companies like Rackspace.com have driven PaaS (Platform as a Service.) (There is also BaaS…)

The cloud beckons to businesses, trying to reduce and secure enterprise architectures. So what’s new in all of that?

Enter FaaS – which is “Function as a Service.”

Since 2012 or so, Amazon Web Services has been leading the way, Google Hosted Services is catching up. And Microsoft is pushing Azure aggressively.  But how does all of this graduate past the server and security architecture (like Directory Services) for distributed businesses? If your operations are spread across any geographic scale and if you need mobile access, you should be studying these trends.

So among the best articles, I’ve read — meaning most informative — is the one in the link below. I’ve quoted some of the text rather than attempting to rewrite it.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

“Fundamentally FaaS is about running back-end code without managing your own server systems or your own server applications. That second clause – server applications – is a key difference when comparing with other modern architectural trends like containers and PaaS (Platform as a Service.)”

Published 04 August 2016

“Mike Roberts is an engineering leader living in New York City. While spending much of his time these days managing people and teams he also still gets to code occasionally, especially in Clojure, and has opinions about software architecture. He is cautiously optimistic that Serverless architectures may be worth some of the hype that they are currently receiving.”

I’m particularly appreciative of the side-bar discussion of the history — how we got to this point, who the players have been and other items of interest fill in the backstory. And we know that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Also, flow charts. These graphics help me a ton.

According to our recent experience for instance – hosting systems in the AWS cloud have increased systems security and uptime, sped access times most especially for mobile apps and have saved clients quite a bit of money. On top of this, the services scale automatically according to demand and service level specs.

Is it time to abandon managing servers in the closet? In a word, yup.