One of the latest innovations in the devops world is EDGE Serverless, a new approach that offers numerous advantages over traditional hosting methods when it comes to deploying your application on the cloud.
Firstly, What is EDGE serverless?
EDGE Serverless, often referred to simply as “Serverless”, is a cloud computing term that removes the need to manage, deploy, maintain and scale any infrastructure. This allows developers to focus solely on writing code and deploying applications.
The central idea behind Serverless is to break down applications into smaller functions, which run in response to specific events or HTTP requests. These functions run on managed infrastructure provided by cloud providers, such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, or Azure Functions. The “EDGE” part of EDGE Serverless refers to the distributed nature of these functions. They operate at the edge locations of a content delivery network (CDN), bringing computing closer to end users. This approach has several advantages over traditional hosting methods.
Benefits of Serverless EDGE
- Scalability
EDGE Serverless platforms automatically scale their capacities based on demand. When your application experiences whats known as “spike” in traffic, the underlying infrastructure adapts perfectly to handle the load, ensuring all users are attended to. This all happens automatically, under the hood without any load balancing, scaling on demand, spinning up new servers that are usually configured in tools such as Kubernetes.
- Cost
With traditional hosting, you usually have pay for the server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week even if the server is not in use. However, when it comes to EDGE Serverless, the game changes entirely. This innovative approach only charges you for the actual computational time used by its functions, and this holds true across all major service providers. It’s essentially a “pay-as-you-go” model, and it can lead to substantial savings in hosting expenses, particularly for applications with varying traffic patterns.
Now, if your usage surpasses a certain threshold, your account will be billed accordingly. This is a sensible practice, as it signifies that the company is profiting from the surge in traffic.
What’s truly remarkable about these cloud nodes is that they are auto-provisioned and managed seamlessly. Gone are the days when you needed a dedicated team of DevOps professionals working alongside your development team. Today, a skilled developer with some DevOps knowledge, or at the very least, a single DevOps expert, can independently set up the project, establish connections for CI/CD pipelines, and deploy to the EDGE network—all with the simple click of a button or a single push command. It’s a streamlined and efficient process that empowers developers like never before.
- Faster response times
The distributed nature of EDGE Serverless functions means they are closer to the user, reducing latency and improving response times for your application.
Serverless providers
I have personally worked with AWS Lambda, Cloudflare workers and Vercel.
While my expertise mostly revolves around Cloudflare, I must say that Vercel stands out as my favorite, primarily due to its incredibly user-friendly user experience within their service dashboard.
What’s even more impressive is that this very blog is hosted for free on the Vercel Serverless network. I must admit, I’m thoroughly impressed by this! Why bother with hosting fees when I can run my application without any cost, especially considering that my traffic is relatively low, meaning I’ll never be billed by Vercel.