Function-as-a-Service: The Key to Serverless and Cost-Effective Computing

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a cloud computing model that allows users to develop, run, and manage applications over the cloud. Moreover, it allows complex building and maintaining of the software infrastructure and aids to easily deploy applications on the cloud. FaaS model is based on serverless computing technology where the cloud service provider takes the responsibility to manage the application servers. In the FaaS model, the person who develops the software has no role in managing the application servers.

The FaaS market has boosted due to several benefits such as reduced costs, enhanced scalability, and quick adoption of FaaS by enterprises. The FaaS model is cost-efficient and unlike the traditional cloud providers, the FaaS service provider does not charge its clients for their idle computation time.

Providing FaaS with AI acceleration

Xilinx, a U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing company, has signed a contract with Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, to provide artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration to Alibaba Cloud FaaS. Alibaba’s cloud FaaS consists of a number of images that require oversight to handle the data and process work. Alibaba has been looking for an alternative and cost-effective solution to reduce the operational expenses and detect the harmful and unwanted text information that is embedded in millions of images over the cloud.

A large amount of internet data consists of thousands of images that can be harmful and unwanted such as unpaid advertisements. Therefore, to maintain a smooth experience over the internet, keeping an eye on the images is a necessity which leads to the generation of large AI inference workload. Alibaba has searched for several solutions to reduce operational costs. However, the majority of them were not well-optimized, could only achieve limited queries, and were not able to provide the proper solution. Thus, Alibaba signed a contract with Xilinx to save 75% of the total cost of ownership. One Xilinx FGPA can overlook hundreds of pictures-per-second and the fact that its cost-effectiveness made Alibaba choose Xilinx for its cloud FaaS over other solutions.

Zoho providing no-code facility to the software developers

Zoho, an Indian software development company, has launched a FaaS platform called Catalyst to build applications on its cloud platform using Kubernetes, an open-source system for the management of containerized applications as an extension. The FaaS platform focuses mainly on professional developers. The platform would provide serverless computing and will allow the developers to choose any programming language according to their preference which includes Java, Node.js, and Python. Moreover, the platform allows developers to access the web, mobile software development kits (SDKs), and application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition, the users can call microservices developed by Zoho itself as a function.

The specialty of the FaaS platform is that you have to enter either no-code or a low-code for the development of software, making it easier for the developers to build applications. This could be a reason why the developers are attracted to this FaaS platform as they do not have to write any code. Using this Faas platform, Zoho aims to make serverless computing framework more accessible to the professional developers and allow them to carry out the serverless computing.

FaaS-The key to improve DevOps efficiency

With the rise in popularity of microservices and serverless computing, the developers of DevOps have realized that FaaS is beneficial to build and maintain enterprise applications. DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and IT operations. This shift of the companies toward serverless architecture using FaaS is due to several reasons such as a reduction in time to deploy code for the software application. Moreover, FaaS is cost-efficient and because of the facility of server management from the backend, the developers can focus on developing and executing programs. In addition, FaaS is very effective for deploying new code, getting feedback, and repeating the same processes.

The increase in shift from DevOps to serverless computing leads to a growth in the global function-as-a-service market. According to the Allied Market Research, the global function-as-a-service industry is expected to reach $24.0 billion registered at CAGR of 29.7% from 2019 to 2026. FaaS can the best option for software architecture and it is to be believed that the evolution of FaaS would be extremely innovative and unpredictable. The introduction of FaaS applications has led to a growth in the cloud infrastructure service market due to the cost-effectiveness, scalability, and agile computing features of the FaaS applications. Furthermore, the FaaS market is expected to dominate the other cloud platforms.

Reference:

https://containerjournal.com/topics/container-ecosystems/zoho-taps-kubernetes-to-drive-faas-platform/

https://www.fudzilla.com/news/memory-and-storage/50450-xilinx-provides-alibaba-cloud-faas-with-ai-acceleration

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