What Is a Serverless Microservice?

In our few previous publications, we discussed the commonly asked matters around serverless, FaaS, microservices such as Serverless Functions vs Microservices, Difference Between FaaS and Serverless etc. What Iis a Serverless Microservice? Serverless microservice is combination of both serverless and microservice. Serverless microservices run within vendor’s serverless infrastructure only when they are needed by the application. Microservices can be broken up into even smaller functions to run on serverless platform. Microservices and Serverless Architecture are nice compliments to one another. We can build different microservices in a variety of languages and have them communicate via a Rest API. Although, Serverless and Microservice are different technical different ideas, they are often talked about together because of this possibility to combine.

Serverless and Microservices essentially are two different things. Serverless is anything which can provide resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and also measured service to the user. Additionally, Serverless can automatically scale up to accommodate many concurrent users and scale back down when traffic subsides. This typical characteristic increases the performance of our applications while saving money. Serverless architecture basically reduce the infrastructure overheads and costs as costs are computed based on the CPU usage. On the other hand, microservices is a way to design software as loosely coupled services that can be independently evolved, released, and managed. Also we spend much less time managing the servers. In Microservices, we usually tend to write platform-independent code which can be packaged once and run everywhere.

However, there is also synergy between the two. Microservice design already have broken down the traditional monolithic applications into loosely coupled services. The systems which have adopted microservices architecture are well placed to move to serverless. Due to better virtualization of resources and an environment for reusing APIs of the others, serverless indeed an excellent environment to build a microservices architecture.