What is The Difference Between Serverless and Microservices?

For different businesses, technology use happens to be the primary aspect that sets the business enterprise apart from its competitors. Hence, it is essential for business enterprises to upgrade, depending on the latest technologies. So, it is essential to ensure that the business enterprise maintains the prerequisite balance between flexibility in future technology and ROI on the latest technology investments.

However, it is important to consider the integration of knowledge and preparation during the upgrade process. Technology is advancing at a faster pace. Hence, it is essential for the serverless development companies to scale easily. Moreover, they should be agile enough to exhibit improved performance with consistent delivery. This kind of evolution leads to technologies such as serverless computing and microservices.

What are microservices?

Microservice happens to be the architectural pattern for breaking down a specific app into smaller services and apps. There are different ways to implement the microservices. If you want to execute it independently, every microservice comprises the following basic elements: the libraries, the database, and the templates.

 It is known to adopt the SOA rules, which the potential user will use to create the latest apps and execute different apps. Such microservices apps are created and tested for functionality individually before deployment.

What is serverless?

In the serverless architecture, the app is completely or partly hosted on a different third-party server. It indicates that the business enterprises do not need to worry about maintaining and spending the physical hardware at the specific location. A trusted third party manages the storage, network, and physical infrastructure.

Serverless architecture and microservices are two different concepts. Both of them are meant to improve the agility, scalability, and modularity of different apps. Serverless and microservices are meant to improve the scalability, modularity, and agility of different apps.

Scalability

The capabilities of scaling happen to be a primary differentiator. The serverless architecture allows the individual functions to scale automatically, depending on the total count of events that trigger them. So, the developers and the serverless computing companies do not need to worry about infrastructure management, as the cloud service provider handles it.

There are scopes to scale every small individual service independently, according to the demand within the microservice architecture. Such scaling processes need an automated system and manual configuration.

Granularity

 The microservice-based architecture is known to function at a fine-grained level. On the other hand, the large monolithic app gets separated into smaller, deployable services. This microservice is the representation of an independent and self-contained component that holds responsibility for certain business capabilities.

The serverless architecture is one step ahead with regards to granularity. It will break a specific app down into different functions that are smaller than different services. Every function is the representation of the singular business logic, which is run with regards to certain triggers and events.

Runtime

The serverless functions are executed in a completely ephemeral and stateless environment, which is handled by the cloud service provider. It indicates that the data that is stored during the function’s execution gets lost at any time after its completion. The microservices are typically deployed on the virtual machines, thereby providing the necessary time to store the state over the course of time.

Deployment and development

Speaking of the differences between microservice and serverless architectures, you will witness that serverless allows a faster deployment and development cycle than microservices. Speaking of the microservices architecture, it is necessary to develop, deploy, and test the service automatically through container technology.

Such an approach provides independence and flexibility. It needs coordination. Hence, the developers need to handle service discovery, inter-service communication, fault tolerance, and data consistency. Thus, it leads to better operational overhead.

Serverless architecture decreases operational complications, thereby leading to consistent delivery. With the removal of infrastructure management, the serverless architecture provides the individual functions to deploy, pack, and scale automatically within the cloud service environment.

Infrastructure management

Speaking of the serverless architecture, the third-party service provider manages the cloud infrastructure. Thus, the developer should not be stressed out about scaling, managing, and provisioning different resources. Hence, the developer will not have any control over the happenings under the hood.

However, they are free to work on code deployment. The developers hold the responsibility to handle the whole technology stack, which provides support for every microservice. Such an approach provides improved flexibility.

Cost

Cost happens to be a distinguishable factor that distinguishes the two architectures from one another. The serverless functions get charged, depending on the total count of events they are processing and billing on a per-use basis. Such an approach provides a suitable opportunity for business enterprises to remove the need for long-term commitments and upfront investment. Thus, it decreases the entire IT cost.

Such architecture provides an affordable choice for different apps with unpredictable and sporadic use patterns. Speaking of the microservice architecture, the cost is based on resource management and infrastructure provisioning. Hence, you will pay only for the specific resources, which are allocated to every service, irrespective of whether they are sitting idle or processing the requests.

Serverless architecture happens to be the future of cloud computing and software development models. It is capable of resolving the microservices, which are beneficial, as the big apps, which have different upfront costs, are developed. Thus, lightweight and small apps are maintained in the form of a monolithic architecture.

If faster deployment to market and cost are the top priorities, serverless happens to be a good option for serverless for enterprises. If the primary goal of the business enterprise is to create a massive, complicated app where the product should evolve and change, it is a convenient choice to opt for microservices.