LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

A Review on Serverless Architecture of Web Applications.

Presented By,
Jodhan Saji
Reg No:11905623
Branch: B-tech CSE
 INTRODUCTION

SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE

COMPARING DIFFERENT SERVERLESS PLATFORMS

SECURITY OF SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE

FUTURE SCOPE

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
•Serverless computing is gaining wide popularity among developers, business organizations and
cloud service providers because its function-as-a-service model enables efficient application
development and deployment without the need to handle underlying infrastructure.

•Serverless architecture is a cloud computing execution model that enables developers to focus on
business logic rather than architecture or server upkeep with the help of events or functions.

•The market offers a variety of serverless computing services from top cloud providers, including
AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and some open source.
SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE
Serverless Architecture and its Use Cases

•In Serverless architecture, a cloud service provider manages the infrastructure and dynamically allocates
computing resources, such as computing power, storage, and networking, as needed to execute code functions.

•These functions response to incoming requests which makes it stateless and fully function centric.

•With serverless architecture, developers do not need to worry about provisioning and managing servers,
operating systems, or scaling infrastructure to handle traffic spikes instead they can focus on writing code to
create individual functions or microservices which are triggered by requests.

•Serverless architecture is now widely accepted in the field of web development, mobile applications and IoT
devices.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Serverless Architecture

•Serverless architecture reduces the complexity of managing infrastructure which enables

•Serverless technology is still new to the IT industry and not yet proven to be efficient in large
scale web applications. The main drawbacks of serverless architecture are Cold startups,
Limited control over infrastructure and Vendor lock-ins.

•Security of the backend code is also considered as a threat as it may contain personal and
sensitive information which are directly provided to the cloud vendors
FIGURE 1. LOAD VS RESPONSE TIME FIGURE 2. COST-EFFICIENCY ON SERVERLESS
Different Types of Serverless Architecture Platforms and their Comparisons

•The major cloud service providers have shifted their attention to serverless architecture
offerings in the past years. Some of them include Oracle Functions, Google Cloud Functions,
Alibaba Functions Compute, IBM Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, Amazon Web
Services (AWS) Lambda, and Google Cloud Functions.

•AWS Lambda provide scalability and availability out of the box. Azure allows to run code in edge
IoT devices without connectivity issues. All of them use object storage which is highly scalable.

•AWS provides integration with other AWS services including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3,
and Amazon API Gateway. Whereas Azure allows to integrate with their services such as Azure
Cosmos DB, Azure Notification Hubs and Event Grid. Integration with Google Cloud Pub/Sub,
Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud Firestore is possible using Google functions.
•API management is achieved in diverse ways. AWS uses Amazon API Gateway allowing developers to maintain
APIs at any scale as necessary. Using Azure Functions Proxies, developers can divide monolith API surfaces into
separate functions by creating microservice architecture. Whereas Google uses Cloud Endpoints and Apigee to
manage control and visibility into APIs.

•Programming languages like Python, Node.js, C#, and Java are supported by AWS and Azure functions
supports programming languages such as JavaScript, C#, F#, PowerShell, Python and Typescript. Whereas
Google functions only supports Python, Node.js and Go.

•For workflow automation AWS Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Google Cloud Workflows are used in AWS Lamba,
Microsoft Azure functions and Google Functions, respectively. These platforms also provide monitoring and
debugging tools such as AWS X-Ray, Azure Logic Apps and Cloud Functions Framework.

•Pricing is based on the resource consumed by the development needs and resources are scaled according to
the needs. Each of these differ in verity of features as discussed and should be chosen according to the need
of the development.
SECURITY OF SERVERLESS
ARCHITECTURE
•Serverless removes responsibility of security from the developers up to a significant extent since the cloud
provider manages all the security vulnerabilities in the underlying infrastructure and cloud services. So,
developer should be careful while selecting a secure cloud provider. Although majority of security measures
are taken care by the cloud vendors, developers should also take care of the security breaches in serverless
functions and protect the application data.

•Since the serverless functions are stateless and short-lived it becomes difficult for the attackers to
successfully execute their attacks. This model tightens the time availability of the sensitive information to
the attackers from functions. Due to its auto scaling property, it is also highly resistant to Denial-of-service-
attacks (DoS) because the existing functions which are designed to be terminated after usage cannot be
looped.

•Although flaws in the function could lead to common application-level attacks like Cross-Site Scripting
(XSS), Denial of Service (DoS), Command/SQL Injection, and many others, they are not the only threat. The
high dependency of cloud vendors in serverless architecture can also result in security breaches like
unauthorized access to resources by misconfigured access controls.
BEST PRACTICES
•Best practices in serverless architecture are still evolving and will be made better when more
organizations and developers endorse serverless. With the passage of time new standards and specific
frameworks will be evolved to make serverless more stable.

•Developers must design functions to be stateless and should ensure that it is scalable and do not rely
on external states. By optimizing function code size and adopting warmup requests developers can
ensure cold-start problems of serverless are resolved.

•It is important to write code that is easy to debug and monitor. Selection of best serverless framework
include frameworks which can manage scalable stateless functions to deploy and develop applications
easily. With these we can attain a huge difference in the response time compared to previous methods.
FUTURE SCOPE
•The future of serverless architecture appears promising despite some of the challenges. Serverless
architecture will become more scalable for large-scale online applications as new frameworks and
standards emerge over time.

•The application of serverless architecture, which includes web and mobile applications, IoT devices,
chatbots, virtual assistants and backend processing is a promising field of research as it helps in
building more scalable applications in reduced costs.

•To sum up, serverless architecture have shown significant potential in web development. Despite
the existence of some obstacles, such vendor lock-in, cold start latency and security, the future of
serverless computing in contemporary web applications seems bright. Serverless architecture will
remain essential for developers, cloud providers, and end users that consider utilizing these
techniques for developing and deploying scalable and resource-efficient web applications.
CONCLUSION
•Serverless architecture is in the stage of evolving into simpler, cheaper and a better way to
manage resources. This new computing paradigm in the cloud clearly differentiate itself form
current virtualization technologies as it is having its own security features and security threads as
we discussed.

•This study identifies best practice to deploy web application in a scalable way according to the
needs of the development. Despite the challenges to serverless architecture, it is a paradigm that
enables the development of event-driven web applications by utilizing the resources proficiently.

•We believe that serverless architecture will continue to evolve resulting in more frameworks and
standards which eventually helps developers taking complete advantage of serverless architecture
to build and deploy more scalable web applications in low cost.
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