Modelon Solutions

By  now you’ve probably heard of something called ServerLess architecture. Now let’s get something straight – this is not about creating apps without servers, but rightly about building apps about we don’t think about servers as the deployment unit.

Non-ServerLess architectures (wow, that sounds weird) is our traditional way of building aps where we compile something into a DLL (or something), then package a few of these things together into a unit. Each unit has a bunch of responsibilities and usually depends on other units (a SQL database, a web service…). Each unit is then deployed on a server of some sort and then we have to think about scaling these things correctly and maintaining connections between the different parts… sounds crazy if you ask me 🙂 When you scale, you end up scaling the whole functionalities included in the unity being scaled.

ServerLess architectures focus on small functionalities (think micro-services). Each function is deployed independently and probably depends on other functions. The thing is each function is scalable on it’s own. One function that is used often might be scaled up, while the other function which gets called once a day stays calm. Under the hood, there are servers but we just tend not to think about them too much. There are usually two kinds of functions, ones that are triggered (http call, event…) or timed (on a schedule).

Azure Functions is one of many offerings (Amazon Lambda is another big player and i love these guys WebTask.IO) that allows you to deploy systems using this kind of architecture.

The last thing i really like about these systems is the extension concept they provide. For example, let’s say a search aggregator requires an algorithm by each provider to verify if user can click on a link. Instead of coding each rue in the main system, each provider can easily host a “Function” that provides the answer and the search aggregator calls them just in time…

Next big thing i do will use these concepts in one way or another – watch out servers out there cause i will start forgetting you exist !!!