Serverless -BAAS or FAAS or Both

Most of us who work in the software and cloud development industry for a fair amount of time is aware of Serverless. There are two more terms that are used interchangeably and related to the serverless platform.

BAAS

FAAS

In the rest of the article, Let's see what are these two terms and how we can relate them to Serverless platforms.

1. Serverless Definition
2. BAAS
3. FAAS
4. Conclusion

Serverless

Serverless, in layman’s terms, is without a server. That means anything which is not on the server. But that's not true if you ask a cloud or software engineer. Anything, where an application runs that are used by people globally, needs to be managed via a server. The server can be any machine, either it can be on any cloud platform or on any private machine-based server.

When we talk of serverless, we internally mean that the Server is there too but the application development team may not be responsible to manage the infrastructure components as mentioned below.

1. Auto Scaling
2. Load balancing
3. Network security (Shared Model)
4. Backups

All the points listed above are certain configurations, which should be managed by the infra team if we are working on product development. And if we get all these out of the box from a cloud provider without any additional manpower and time, we may opt for it. That's where Serverless comes forward. And cloud provider gives you their platform and you deploy your application and manage the business logic.

In nutshell, This is what Serverless is

BAAS

Backend as a service.

When we are working on a distributed development. We have our component of application working on one server and another one working on some other server and they both interact via different API connectivity methods.

Now, there are some general functionalities that every product needs.

1. Authentication
2. Analytics
3. Notification

These are some of the common functionalities that most products need. So what cloud providers are doing is, there are exposing these functionalities ready-made via some additional configuration so that the application team can follow the real-world development and can have a quick release to market.

Examples- Google Firebase, AWS Amplify, Parse, Sentry

Benefits

1. Reduces time to market
2. Reduces development effort
3. Can be integrated into a serverless or non-serverless module.

FAAS

Function As A Service

We normally relate Serverless to cloud functions that are normally cloud native. There are different types of services being provided by different cloud providers to deploy normal functions on cloud service. I have listed a few of the popular cloud providers for Function

Examples — AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google cloud functions

Benefits

1. Quick to release as an MVP
2. Reduces App size
3. Less overhead in managing the server

Cons

1. Have some execution limit of 10–15 minutes depending on cloud providers.
2. Have certain challenges on cold start
3. Vendor lock in- Depends if you have a written function in such language/framework that's not supported by any other cloud provider.
4. Serverless functions are better until a certain limit because there is a concurrency challenge also that doesn't permit one to run a lot of lambda functions in parallel.
5. Increased latency because of cold start and increasing running time and cost of lambda as well.

Conclusion

So, to sum up, Both terms i.e BAAS and FAAS can be marked under the Serverless umbrella as more or less they relate to common benefits and use cases.