Serverless Introduction for Front-End Engineers

Trend

According to the RightScale 2019 Cloud State Report, Serverless usage grew the fastest among public cloud services from 2018 to 2019, with a 50% increase, ranking alongside Streaming Process.

Google Trends shows a steady rise in Serverless interest over the past two years, with China leading the heat map, indicating strong enthusiasm and ongoing development.

Concept

Serverless combines “server” and “less”, meaning “less server” or “no server”. It does not eliminate servers but abstracts away hardware, software, and stability concerns, letting users focus on application code and pay per execution time. Major products include AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and Alibaba Cloud Function Compute.

Evolution

Before cloud computing, resources were bare‑metal physical machines requiring costly infrastructure. With cloud computing, users could rent virtual machines (IaaS), reducing hardware management. The rise of containers introduced PaaS and CaaS, allowing developers to focus on software. Serverless further abstracts to function‑level execution, charging only for runtime.

Architecture

Serverless architecture consists of FaaS (Function‑as‑a‑Service) and BaaS (Backend‑as‑a‑Service). FaaS provides a platform to upload and trigger functions, while BaaS offers API‑based services such as databases, object storage, message queues, and logging.

Serverless operates via event‑driven triggers; an API Gateway receives HTTP requests, passes parameters to the function platform, which runs the function together with BaaS services, returns results, and then the execution environment is destroyed.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages include reduced operational overhead, automatic scaling, and pay‑per‑use pricing. Disadvantages include vendor lock‑in, unsuitability for long‑running tasks, cold‑start latency, and debugging/testing challenges.

Vendor lock‑in : Using a cloud provider’s Serverless product often ties you to its other services, increasing migration cost.

Not suitable for long‑running tasks : Execution time limits (e.g., 10 minutes on Alibaba Function Compute) require task splitting and orchestration.

Cold start latency : First invocation may incur noticeable delay.

Debugging and testing : Differences between local and cloud environments increase development effort and cost.

Use Cases

Typical scenarios include scheduled tasks, data processing, low‑frequency requests, IoT device handling, and cognitive computing such as chatbots.

Conclusion

Serverless in China is still early‑stage with limited mature cases, but it promises to simplify front‑end developers’ work by allowing them to focus on business logic using Node.js, potentially reshaping web development workflows.