Comparing performance and developer experience for a serverless application integrated with a serverless database

Abstract: Cloud computing has introduced a paradigm shift in the information technology sector by enabling the user to access computing resources over the internet. Serverless is a new cloud computing technology that has gained significant popularity for the deployment of services and applications. Serverless applications are often integrated with other services such as serverless databases. Existing work in the area of performance evaluation of serverless applications mainly focuses on serverless applications that are not integrated with a serverless database. Additionally, there is a lack of evaluation of the user experience for the implementation of a serverless application on the different cloud providers. This thesis aims to evaluate the performance and developer experience of serverless applications integrated with a serverless database on the three leading cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. This was performed by implementing and performing tests on an experimental serverless application implemented on each platform. Furthermore, the thesis compares the performance difference between the two programming languages Python and Javascript (Node.js). This thesis indicates that AWS has the overall best performance and user experience of the three platforms.