Traditional vs. Serverless Architecture

For years your applications have run on servers which you had to patch, update, and continuously look after late nights and early mornings due to all the unimaginable errors that broke your production. As long as you managed them, the whole responsibility of their proper functioning was on you. Serverless tends to be unlike the aforementioned, you no longer need to worry about the underlying servers. Reason being, they are not managed by you anymore and with management out of the picture the responsibility falls on the Cloud vendors. But regardless the cool features of Serverless in some cases, the traditional architecture outshines it.

Pricing

One of the major advantages of using Serverless is reduced cost, for years the cost of provisioning servers and maintaining that 24x7 server team which blew a hole in your pocket is gone. The cost model of Serverless is execution-based: you’re charged for the number of executions. You’re allotted a certain number of seconds of use that varies with the amount of memory you require. Likewise, the price per MS (millisecond) varies with the amount of memory you require. Obviously, shorter running functions are more adaptable to this model with a peak execution time of 300-second for most Cloud vendors.

The winner here is Serverless Architecture.

Networking

The downside is that Serverless functions are accessed only as private APIs. To access these you must set up an API Gateway. This doesn’t have an impact on your pricing or process, but it means you cannot directly access them through the usual IP, snap!

The winner here is Traditional Architecture.

3rd Party Dependencies

Most, if not all of your projects have external dependencies, they rely on libraries that are not built into the language or framework you use. You often use libraries with functionality that includes cryptography, image processing, etc., these libraries can be pretty heavy. Without system-level access, you must package these dependencies into the application itself.

Reinventing the wheel isn’t always a good idea.

The winner here is based on the context. For simple applications with few dependencies, Serverless is the winner; for anything more complex, Traditional Architecture is the winner.

Environments

Setting up different environments for Serverless is as easy as setting up a single environment. Given that it’s pay per execution, this is a large improvement over traditional servers, you no longer need to set up dev, staging, and production machines. Eventually you’d lose count of all the environments, at some point.

The winner here is Serverless Architecture.

Timeout

With Serverless computing, there’s a hard 300-second timeout limit. Too complex or long-running functions aren’t good for Serverless, but having a hard timeout makes it impossible to perform certain tasks. A hard limit on this time makes Serverless unusable for applications that have variable execution times, and for certain services which require information from an external source.

The clear winner here is Traditional Architecture.

Scale

Scaling process for Serverless is automatic and seamless, but there is a lack of control or entire absence of control. While automatic scaling is great, it’s difficult not to be able to address and mitigate errors related to new Serverless instances.

It’s a tie between Serverless and Traditional Architecture.