What is serverless computing? - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] So, why are people talking about serverless? You know, what is it that it's trying to do and what is the problems it's trying to solve? You're at this course because you're looking for answers to that and also to see, you know, how you can use this. One of the things that we think about when we go and talk about the cloud, the allure of the public cloud, is that it's a way that we can go out and build applications where we don't have to worry about all the hardware, infrastructure, all the costs, and time to be able to build a system. We wanna be able to take advantage of all the promises that the cloud has. Things like being able to be quick to market, reducing how much we're spending on operations, and giving us the opportunity to adapt quickly to changing conditions. The whole challenge of going from owning a solution, and running it on my own hardware, and running everything on premise, where I've got all of that infrastructure is that, as companies, and organizations, and people, as we move from being on premise, where we own the entire infrastructure, the whole stack of stuff, where we not only build the machines but we power them, we secure them, we run stuff, we might do virtualization on them, but there's a lot of expense and when you shut down the data center and you wanna go to the public cloud, well, there's different patterns that you can use. And those patterns are, you know, being able to do the lift and ship. Where I can just pick up my VMs and instead of running them locally, I'm gonna run them up in the cloud. And one of my thoughts is that it is just the least effective way to use the cloud because you still have all of the overhead of understanding how that infrastructure is built, building out virtual networks, and connecting up security groups, and, you know, how does the networking firewalls work to prevent things from happening, and encryption. I mean, it gets to be a real challenge to try to build out these IaaS infrastructures and service type of solutions. And PaaS, being some of these more modern services, where you've got things like application services, and service fabric, allow us to be able to focus more on just our application and not have to worry about all of the other stuff. And this is a very attractive thing because it enables us to get closer to where we wanna be, with really taking advantage of what that public cloud is. And when you think about, you know, the first scenarios where someone's going out to, you know, go out and do something. There's a company out of California called Flavorist. So, the company was selling tickets online and had an infrastructure that could sell two thousand tickets an hour, which is a lot of tickets. It's a lot of infrastructure, and if he wanted to double it, he'd just buy another machine and set it up, and then he's selling two thousand tickets an hour. Well, they got a call from some country music something, something, something, where they wanted to do, sell a lot of tickets and he said how many, and they said, 150 thousand, and he said, well, let's see what we can do with the cloud. And, you think about it, 75 hours is a long time using one instance and getting it down to maybe one hour, but you can do better if you can take advantage of this public infrastructure, where they've got the capability to burst out. And so after six years of development, they took that application and they ran it, and they sold 150 thousand tickets in 10 seconds. And the thing about going 10 seconds, it's like, yeah the banks are only so fast. How did they do it? Well, they used the platforms and service where they didn't worry about the machines, and the scaling, and all of that infrastructure that you have to do. They were able to take advantage of being able to just go out and focus on their problem, and then scale it out, and their first scenario crossed all the machines that they wanted to. They ran it for five minutes and then when they were done, they shut it off. And by shutting it off, you're no longer paying for it, so the total cost of this was less than a thousand dollars. So, when you think about serverless applications, we're talking about how we can really take advantage of scenarios where we do wanna pay for consumption, where we wanna pay per use. Inside of Azure, there's a number of different services that are available. There's a whole slew of them but there's the logic apps and function apps which are built around a serverless ideal. Where you have a consumption plan and you are just paying per use, and you have other kinds of services. Things like streaming, where I've got data coming in and going out, and doing analytics against it. Where I've got data services that allow me to get insights into what's going on and messaging services, things like event hubs and IOT hubs, and that's why we're going to dive into the serverless thing.