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Serverless and Containers have some high-level similarities. They eliminate complexity and make it easier to deploy and scale applications.
Serverless works well if you need to perform relatively simple processing of events without maintaining the underlying infrastructure. Containers are the ideal choice if you need full control over the application hosting environment.
Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. Serverless applications don’t require you to provision, scale, and manage any servers. You can build them for nearly any type of application or backend service, and everything required to run and scale your application with high availability is handled for you.
Building serverless applications means that you can focus on your core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes. You are only responsible for providing the serverless function and are not aware of the underlying compute resources. The serverless runtime provisions server resources automatically and customers are billed according to the number of times and the duration their function ran. Serverless is a model of computing that runs code on-demand without the need to provision or manage infrastructure. Development teams simply deploy their code on a serverless platform and are only charged when that code runs and consumes server resources.
Containers: Containers provide a standard way to package your application’s code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. Containers share an operating system installed on the server and run as resource-isolated processes, ensuring quick, reliable, and consistent deployments, regardless of the environment.
Containers are lightweight and provide a consistent, portable software environment for applications to easily run and scale anywhere. Containers make it easier to manage your underlying infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the cloud, so you can focus on innovation and your business needs.
Container orchestration (such as Kubernetes) automates the scheduling, development, networking, scaling, health monitoring, and management of your containers.
Serverless and Containers are not identical technologies.
Similar, functionality:
Both are more efficient than virtual machines.
To deploy application code.
Abstract applications are away from the host environment.
General Difference between Serverless and containers:
Serverless
No servers to provision or manage.
Automatically scale with usage.
Pay as use.
Highly available.
Container
The standard unit of software that packages up the code and all its dependencies.
The application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.
Supported Language:
Serverless
- To run an application in a serverless model, the serverless runtime must explicitly support that language (different platforms support different languages).
Container
- Applications can be containerized as long as the underlying host server supports the language they are written in.
Environment
Serverless
Underlying infrastructure managed by Cloud Provider. You cannot choose infrastructure on your own.
No Patching headache.
Can’t install software (e.g. WebServer, AppServer, Custom Software) in the underlying environment.
Code libraries can be installed. (e.g. npm, NuGet packages)
Container
Complete control of the environment. You control underlying infrastructure configurations such as VM Size, OS, AMI, etc.
Requires management (e.g. patching, updates) and orchestration.
Install almost any software.
Prepackaged images with different software available.
AWS Lambda Supports Container Image
Runtime is not a constrain in containers, whereas serverless functions typically run for a short period.
USE CASE
Serverless:
IoT: Serverless computing provides an event-driven and straightforward way for IoT devices and external systems to communicate asynchronously.
Native integration with other AWS services such as SQS, SNS, S3, etc. For example, trigger Lambda function when message is added to SQS Queue.
Containers:
Deploy anywhere/Hybrid applications: Containers let you standardize how code is deployed, making it easy to build workflows for applications that run between on-premises and across multiple cloud environments.
CI/CD: Containers provide DevOps teams with a way to eliminate environment differences between dev, QA, staging, and production deployments. As a result, they are highly useful in CI/CD workflows.
Summary
Containers and serverless computing are two of the most popular methods for deploying applications. Containers work better for some use cases, while in others, serverless is what you need. None is better than the other in an absolute sense, each response to specific needs. Serverless and Containers can compensate for each other’s weaknesses. They can coexist and be integrated, as needed, in a single project.