'Serverless Smackdown': Who Leads the Squid Game?

Photo by Sangga Rima Roman Selia on Unsplash.

Developers all around the world are devoting innumerable hours to tackle business problems that did not exist before. But why not hand over this ever-mounting responsibility to someone else?

You guessed it right - we're talking about the futuristic technology of serverless.

However, to ensure your project’s success, you need to make the right call and choose a serverless provider that fits your product’s size, complexity, and scaling ambition.

For that purpose, we have carefully selected the top three serverless platforms of 2021.

Who Has THE BEST Serverless Platform?

AWS Lambda + Serverless = Good Times

AWS Lambda is an AWS serverless computing service that allows you to upload code that you’ve written and run it on the cloud.

This serverless provider supports a whole host of languages and runtime environments, including Python, Node.js, Java, Go, C#, and Ruby.

It’s also a go-to for software-as-a-service web platforms and considered to be the par-excellence for Node.js development.

Pros of AWS Lambda:

• Easy code deployment.
• Connection to the API gateway.
• Fit for adhoc tasks or completely serverless high TPs applications.
• The maturity of AWS Lambda.
• Integrates with other AWS services.

Cons of AWS Lambda

• Potential cold starts.
• Complicated call patterns.

Google Cloud Functions + Firebase = The Unbeatable Duo

Google Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment for developing and connecting cloud services.

If we use AWS Lambda as the Holy Grail of serverless, these two go toe-to-toe with each other regarding execution environments, scalability, and pricing.

However, Google Cloud Functions boasts a narrower range of supported languages and has a poor variety of 3rd-party tools available.

At the same time, AWS Lambda supports unlimited functions per project, whereas Google Cloud Functions offer a maximum of 1000 functions per project, with less executions.

But there’s the catch - AWS Lambda will pause after five minutes, while Google Cloud Functions may run for up to nine minutes.

Pros of Google Cloud Functions:

• Longer execution time.
• Free offering to get started.
• Simple and clear monitoring tools.
• Dependencies management.

Cons of Google Cloud Functions:

• Fewer integrations than AWS.
• JavaScript, Python, or Go only.

Microsoft Azure

Azure offers a set of 100 serverless tools for software development, testing, deployment, and administrations.

The major differentiator of this serverless provider is its predisposition towards DevOps, since its tools are geared towards continuous testing, deployment, and integration.

Microsoft Azurehas minor differences in functionality when compared with AWS Lambda, yet providing more language support in experimental runtimes.

Just like AWS Lambda, Azure supports a selection of programming languages, including JavaScript. C#, F#, Python.

Pros of Azure:

• Great debugging support
• Instant deployment
• Availability of on-premise functions
• Superior security

Cons of Azure:

• Less enterprise-ready.

Who is the Big Winner in the Cloud War?

As we see from our quick comparison, all of the tools mentioned above do the trick. Each has their own fortes and quirks, and each one will try hard to tie you into their ecosystem.

In general, it seems that Google is losing the game from a features perspective and while Azure delivers a powerful solution, AWS Lambda, the oldest provider on the block, kills it with a more inclusive product.

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