What is Functions as a Service, or FaaS as it is more commonly known as. Are FaaS and Serverless the same thing, or are they different? Hi I’m Jason Goode with IBM Cloud team, I’m going to answer those questions for you today, but before we go too FaaS, please make sure to hit that subscribe button. All right, I’m excited to get into let’s take a step back and look at a time before we had cloud. So back in the day an organization would have to manage their whole IT software stack on premises.
So, let’s take a look at that. So at the bottom here you would have your Hardware, and this would be all your compute, your network, and your storage resources. And then moving on up we’d have our Virtualization layer, and essentially what happens here is you’d be virtualizing all those hardware resources with something say like a hypervisor to create modular virtual machines so you can horizontally scale. And then moving on up, we then move into our Operating System. And I’m sure most of you are aware of what this is, this would be the software that’s actually on your computer and enables programs to run.
And then on top of that we run into our Runtime, and this would really be the glue between your Operating System and your Application and be the environment that your Application operates in.
And then last but not least, we have our Application. And this would be where all the magic happens. So this would be your business logic, right. And this is where your development team will spend most their time, because this is where they design, build, and deploy your application.
So, as you can see this is quite a bit for one organization to maintain and own, you know up front you have a lot of costs with your hardware and you’re not very agile, say something goes down in this IT stack here, I mean it could affect any of these given layers. And the time to provision and get your application out the door could take anywhere from a week to even a month. So not very efficient.
So, let’s fast forward to the early 2000’s and AWS emerged with a new cloud computing service model, which is Infrastructure as a Service, also known as IaaS. And what IaaS does it actually abstracts these lower layers, these infrastructure layers, which you can now run from a cloud service provider and it’s a common model used today.
So it’s much more cost efficient without having to own and maintain these layers and you can provision and get your application out the door much quicker. So, we’re looking at anything from an hour to minutes, which is a huge increase from that week to month timeline. So then we also had another cloud computing service model emerged which is Platform as a Service.
And as you can see we even took the abstraction level even further with PaaS, so with this model now you’re just worried about your application, that’s all you have to maintain. And the idle time is much shorter too, so you’d be running at least one server but you don’t have to worry about your Runtime, your Operating System, just that Application.
And the time to provision and get your application out the door is much shorter as well, so you’re looking anything from minutes to seconds. All right. So you’re probably wondering, okay, so we’re at the Application layer, how can we abstract even further. Well let me explain. So back in 2014, hook.
io emerged with a new cloud computing service model which is the topic of the hour, and that is Functions as a Service, also known as FaaS. And what FaaS does it abstracts that Application, so now you can only focus on the Functions.
And the functions are the individual components that actually make up that application. So, it’d be the individual tasks you know something like uploading an image file, you just have so much more flexibility and you have zero idle time. So you don’t even need a server, that’s all managed and taken care for you by the cloud service provider.
It’s much more cost effective, and the time to provision with Function as a Service is lightning fast. So we’re looking at anywhere from a second to millisecond. So I know I went through this pretty quick, but hopefully you can get a sense of how Functions as a Service relates to the other cloud computing service models within this landscape. Oh I’m sorry, I should actually take a step back, we should talk about Software as a Service briefly. So that’s another cloud computing service model that actually abstracts all these layers here, including the functions.
And you know, that would be something like YouTube, if you’re watching this video that would be an example of Software as a Service. So now let’s take a look at how Functions as a Service relates to Serverless and take a look at the architecture. All right. So, Functions as a Service, is actually a key subset of Serverless, as well as Backend as a Service. Backend as a Service is any third party service that you integrate with your application and the great thing about it is there’s no code that you need to manage, and there’s no servers.
So let’s take a look at what a Serverless application architecture might look like and let’s use an example of something oh I don’t know let’s say a hair color for gray hair eCommerce storefront, which I’ve never looked into before.
Okay. So we’ll start here with our client, and this would be our hair color eCommerce website. And let’s say we have a user and they click and they want to see some before and after images. So we would have a request come down here and we would have a third party Object Storage Service.
And, the great thing about this is there is no servers involved once again. So this would be one example of Backend as a Service. And it would use something like HTML, it could be Javascript, or CSS and it would actually send those images back to the client. So now that they’ve looked at some before and after images, now we need to get them authenticated.
So we can again have another third party service integrated and we could have this as an Authentication Service.
Okay, so this would be one more example of Backend as a Service, but now let’s let’s take a look at Functions as a Service and let’s say that the client needs to get their account. So we’d have another request come and this would interact with what we call an API Gateway. And this API Gateway would then invoke a function. And we’ll call this function GetAccount. And this GetAccount function will now communicate with a different database, and this would be Customer Database.
So, this would be our Functions as a Service, right here. So this would be one individual task within the greater application. So let’s do another one.
Let’s say the Client makes another request and now they want to see you know what kind of hair color options they they’re working with, right. So we’d have another request go through the API Gateway and this would have another individual function and this would be Available, if i could spell ha, Color.
Okay. So this FunctionAvailableColor would go to a separate database and we’ll call this Color Database, Color DB. All right. So, this is again, just a very simplified view into a Serverless Application Architecture and I mainly want to focus in on the Function as a Service functions right here. So let’s just zoom in right now, and we’ll look at the API Gateway and our functions and expand.
And expand this out as well, the API Gateway. So API Gateway, it translates requests to a single endpoint and then routes it to a different Functions as a Service function. So in our case our user makes requests, right.
So we have Get / api / color. This API Gateway notices the requests and it sees AvailableColorFunction over here because it has Available Color route within the API Gateway.
So again, Functions as a Service is essentially a small piece of code written by developer that are executed in the cloud and run on stateless containers. And what this means is that they do their job and then they disappear. And this leads me to my first key benefit I want to highlight, which is you only pay for what you use. Because unlike our other cloud computing service models if you recall, you always got to pay for some idle time. Even a platform as service you’re responsible for at least one single server.
Another key benefit is you can just focus on that code, right. So without the underlying infrastructure, which is going to be a common theme, you know throughout this whole video, is you could just focus on those individual functions from splitting up that server and that business logic where you don’t have to worry about maintaining it with that underlying infrastructure. Another key benefit is auto acaling. So again, without that infrastructure you can scale on demand, automatically, and instantaneously, right. So if your Function as a Service platform has demand go down, it’ll automatically scale down for you.
The last but not least highlight I want to mention is that it’s inherently highly available. So by being spread across multiple availability zones in different geographical regions, you can deploy your Function as a Service platform in those different regions at no incremental cost. So I know this is just a quick overview of Functions as a Service, but hopefully you can now see some of the key benefits as well as how it relates to Serverless and other cloud computing service models. Thank you. If you have any questions please drop us a line below.
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