When you’re hosting a software application on the internet, you have to consider server infrastructure. There are two choices—use a physical server that requires physical management, or use a cloud-hosted server from providers such as Amazon and Google.
Cloud-hosted servers are becoming increasingly popular for several reasons, including the fact that they’re offsite and relatively low maintenance for the user. They’re especially popular among start-ups and small businesses that want to avoid the costs of an onsite IT team or an on-premises setup.
What is Serverless Architecture?
Serverless architecture is essentially a microservice architecture, meaning you build your infrastructure from different components in the cloud and send them to managed servers – in this case, either to AWS or Google Firebase, who will run your code for you whenever it’s triggered by an event. This makes it easy for your application to scale when needed and you only pay for the runtime.
Whenever an event occurs, a code or function is executes The server runs when something happens. The code only wakes up when it receives a request. It’s not persistent and running all day, all week.It only uses resources when it needs to. The benefit of this is that each function has its responsibility, and none of it overlaps, making things cleaner and less finicky.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Service is a widely adopted and the largest cloud platform in this world. It offers more than 175 full feature services and customizable cloud computing solutions.AWS Lambda is an event-controlled, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services.
This service runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code.AWS is most commonly defined as a FaaS, as it allows users to build and run their applications without having to manage infrastructure.
Benefits of AWS Lambda
- No need to manage servers – WithAWS Lambda you don’t need to manage and constantly keep an eye on infrastructure. Just write, upload, and run the code without provisioning or managing servers.
- Constant Scaling – By running code in response to each event, AWS Lambda scales your application automatically. Your code runs and at the same time processes each trigger separately, scaling accurately with the size of the workload. It enables continuous scaling from several requests per day to thousands per second.
- Cost-optimization – AWSLambda allows you to be charged only for the compute time you consume. You just pay for every millisecond your code executes and the number of times your code is triggered.
- Highly Secure Services – AWS has been created to offer the most flexible and reliable cloud computing environment. The AWS infrastructure satisfies the security requirements of multiple businesses worldwide. It boasts several robust security tools that can support security standards with ease.
- More functionality – AWS is offering more features and services as compared to any other cloud service provider.
Firebase
Firebase is a mobile- and web application development platform, backed by Google, to help developers deliver richer app experiences. It manages its infrastructure with a nice set of tools to simplify the workflow of the developer by providing them with development kits and an online dashboard. These toolkits are interconnected, scalable and integrable with third-party software to overcome complex challenges with standard building blocks.
The platform consists of a great set of development tools. The Realtime Database and Cloud Firestore can stock document-structured data and synchronize the corresponding apps in milliseconds whenever a data transformation occurs. This means that both the app and its database listen to each other, providing the user with reactive app experiences.
Benefits of Firebase
- Managed Service – Similarto Lambda, Firebase takes care of the infrastructure and scaling. It also can monitor your app 24/7 to ensure smooth performance.
- Firebase is enhanced by Google Analytics – Firebaseallows easily tracking a user’s journey and identifying whether the user is using your application on a laptop, mobile phone, or tablet.
- Real-time database –Thecloud-hosted real-time NoSQL database allows synchronizing data in Firebase. It provides easy access for developers to the data within any device and assists engineers in back-end code execution.
- Allows fixing bugs immediately–Bug issues can slow down the app performance and speed of navigation which ultimately affects user engagement. However, Firebase includes a crash reporting feature that warns you immediately if there’s a bug and allows improving application performance.
- Fast and secure–Firebase is easy to use and has a set of tools and services that are essential to speed up the application development process. It also takes care of your application and data security.
Conclusion
When choosing between AWS and Firebase, it all comes down to user preference and business needs.If you’re a smaller business or a startup, particularly if launching a mobile app, Google Firebase may be a better—and more cost-effective—setup for you and your business. Same if you’re looking to write applications from scratch or rewrite existing applications. This is especially true if you don’t need to perform any custom coding on the backend.
AWS comes with much heavier artillery that would better suit larger businesses that need an entire suite of services, daily. In other words, if your applications require heavy data processing and/or complex user authentication functions, AWS is better equipped to handle those responsibilities.
Either serverless architecture can be a good choice, as long as it fits your overall needs. Before making the choice, it’s important that you have a complete understanding of both your applications and the functionalities required to run those applications.
