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Serverless Smackdown: Who Leads The Game?

Developers all around the world are devoting innumerable hours to tackle business problems that did not exist before, and then the cycle continues with Ops teams that put days into getting code to run and making sure that programs are going off without a hitch.

But why not hand over this ever-mounting responsibility to someone else? You guessed it right - 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 = Happy

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 Azure has 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.

This newsletter is sponsored by Webiny, a headless, serverless and open-source CMS with all you need to build serverless apps. Webiny makes it incredibly easy to adopt serverless and we encourage you to explore and discover the new serverless CMS. Webiny v5 beta is now available for testing!