FaaS (Function as A Service)

We have discussed IaaS and CaaS where only Infrastructure and Container level resources are rented on Cloud. Next stage of this paradigm change is to deploy Functions ONLY and pay for resources required to run those only. FaaS (Function as A Service) is one level lower than CaaS to rent resources on Cloud.

One of the biggest challenges to date is, whenever there is a change in the requirement, the whole code-set must redeploy. When code changes, it was always challenging to redeploy ONLY the changed code as there are always dependencies. Breaking the bigger code set into smaller pieces of code sets i.e., functions, can assist in mitigating this challenge wherever possible. Agree, in Data Pipelines it might be difficult but worth having this option to be utilized whenever possible.

As the name says itself, FaaS (Function as A Service) is about deploying ONLY Functions in Cloud. This saves us to manage Infrastructure on our own in Cloud, now we can deploy our Functions ONLY and underneath it the infrastructure will be managed by Cloud providers. Most of the Cloud providers are offering FaaS.

In Agile, most of the time we have multiple teams working in silos on different modules in the same project and can be on the same deliverable. FaaS can be very helpful in this methodology where different teams are able to develop and deploy their Function at any time using CI/ CD in production.

Referring to the same example in CaaS. a user authentication module is built using multiple functions so able to deploy Functions any time can further breakdown the deployment activities and increase the flexibility to be able to deploy smaller piece of code, every time there is a change in the code.