What is Serverless Computing? | Benefits & Use cases - Catalyst

The Rise of Serverless Future

From the days of hosting and provisioning servers in basements to cutting-edge serverless resources provisioned ad hoc, cloud-native technology has come a long way. Serverless is at the forefront of innovation, with multiple advanced technology companies adopting a serverless-first approach. The cloud has evolved to cutting-edge serverless, and it might be time for you to transform to serverless too.

Serverless Computing : Definition & Benefits - Catalyst

Event-driven serverless architecture: The agile way forward!
With serverless architecture, the event-driven model is very popular. An event refers to the creation of an operation that needs to be processed. This event is handled by multiple components downstream, so the error handling and computing is handled downstream. For example, when we create an event function that performs compute when data is pushed to the datastore, the trigger is adding a row in the table and the action is the compute operation.
Microservices: modular microservices to modernize and scale faster
Serverless empowers developers to build microservices that scale rapidly using the vendor’s infrastructure and run only when they are invoked. The microservice architecture provides better observability and helps developers iterate quickly. For example, in a food delivery application, orders, menu listings, and delivery partner assignments are completely decoupled microservices.

Benefits of Serverless Computing

Accelerate time to market
Focus on apps not ops
Scale rapidly with serverless
Pay per use
Agility and Innovation
Polyglot applications
Seamless app deployment

Accelerate time to market

Build features and run experiments in hours instead of weeks. Enable faster and more secure development, deployment, and operations.

Focus on apps not ops

Traditional server management involves the tedious tasks of managing servers, constantly updating patches, and consuming time and effort. With serverless, developers focus on core business logic and optimizing their application. By eliminating infrastructure management, serverless takes the back-end heavy-lifting off developers. Watch video

Scale rapidly with serverless

With serverless technology, developers can enjoy the benefits of elastic scaling. As the application grows in volume in terms of adoption and usage, serverless platform can accommodate the increase in volume automatically, without developers having to worry about capacity planning, and database allocation.

Pay per use

Elastic pricing or usage-based metering is one of the biggest advantages of serverless computing for any business. Since you'll be charged only when the functions are called, you can avoid unnecessary or unutilized monthly server charges. This can help optimize costs.

Agility and Innovation

Become more agile and innovate faster by unlocking flexible infrastructure, easier development and shorter release cycles with serverless.

Polyglot applications

Harness the power of multiple of multiple programming languages to build Polyglot applications that work seamlessly to deliver powerful applications. You can choose the development language that is best for your application!

Seamless app deployment

Deploy applications globally with a single command from your local environment to the Catalyst Development environment.

Serverless Computing is for Everyone

SMBs
Enterprises
Startups
Reap the benefits of pay-per-use services of Catalyst. Build enterprise-grade applications without any capital expenditure and at very low operational cost
Through applications that respond to events, serverless computing gives enterprises a new level of flexibility.
Build powerful microservices and completely serverless applications to improve observability, reduce redundancy.
Host your applications globally with the reliability of Zoho’s infrastructure
Adopt the Strangler pattern to break the monolith and pave the way for modular microservices
Leverage the power of prebuilt services
Experience the ease of serverless development on the simplest serverless platform while we take care of provisioning, monitoring and patching
Decouple your monolith iteratively to experience the benefits of serverless microservices
Stay agile and innovate quicker
Read case study

SMBs

Reap the benefits of pay-per-use services of Catalyst. Build enterprise-grade applications without any capital expenditure and at very low operational cost

Host your applications globally with the reliability of Zoho's infrastructure

Experience the ease of serverless development on the simplest serverless platform while we take care of provisioning, monitoring and patching

Enterprises

Through applications that respond to events, serverless computing gives enterprises a new level of flexibility.

Adopt the Strangler pattern to break the monolith and pave the way for modular microservices

Decouple your monolith iteratively to experience the benefits of serverless microservices

Startups

Build powerful microservices and completely serverless applications to improve observability, reduce redundancy.

Leverage the power of prebuilt services

Stay agile and innovate quicker

Read case study

Some use-cases of Serverless Computing

Building REST APIs that can serve as the integration for various applications on both web and mobile
Building data processing pipelines that run in the background as a microservice for things like data migration and data analysis
Running scheduled jobs at set intervals of time, to perform tasks such as cleaning databases, analyzing logs, and more

Building rich web applications and mobile applications
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence workloads
Event driven applications
Media processing

Read more such use cases

Busting Top 3 Serverless Myths

Myth 1: Coldstarts and timeouts are common with serverless
Coldstart and timeouts are necessary evils with serverless, but more often than not it helps you write better code. For example, reducing your package size, maintaining modular code, and executing scheduled jobs are easy ways to avoid greater latency for coldstarts and avoiding timeouts.
Using Nodejs over Java also helps!
Myth 2: Serverless is not secure
Developers often have this misconception that serverless is not secure. For most use cases, serverless is as secure, if not more secure, than an on-premise service. This is because patching and monitoring is handled by the provider. You might miss out on a patch update as a developer handling multiple roles, but a DevOps expert working with the provider will not.
As long as you follow the zero-trust model and follow the best practices, such as encrypting tokens and batch processing, it’s most likely that serverless is secure for you (Unless you run a service with confidential data that shouldn’t leave your premises)
Myth 3: Serverless involves a huge learning curve
Serverless involves a mindset change, but doesn’t come with a huge learning curve. With options like Catalyst, the simplest serverless platform, your developers can get up and running in no time. You can bring your own code to the serverless functions and install third-party dependencies as well. Serverless platforms also provide a seamless local debugging experience with support for your favourite IDE.

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