Architectural Implications of Serverless and Function-as-a-Service

Abstract: Serverless or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a recent architectural style that is based on the principles of abstracting infrastructure management and scaling to zero, meaning application instances are dynamically started and shut down to accommodate load. This concept of no idling servers and inherent autoscaling comes with benefits but also drawbacks. This study presents an evaluation of the performance and implications of the serverless architecture and contrasts it with the so-called monolith architectures. Three distinct architectures are implemented and deployed on the FaaS platform Microsoft Azure Functions as well as the PaaS platform Azure Web App. Results were produced through experiments measuring cold starts, response times, and scaling for the tested architectures as well as observations of traits such as cost and vendor lock-in. The results indicate that serverless architectures, while it is subjected to drawbacks such as vendor lock-in and cold starts, provides several benefits to a system such as reliability and cost reduction.