The Feasibility of Function as a Service to Improve Backend

Abstract

Since cloud computing emerged, business paradigm was changed more dynamically, thus application architecture was required to have a capability to be interact with new requirements as fast as possible. Therefore, Microservices has been the trend of application architecture due to its flexibility. However, some of issues have been surfaced and the movement to solve those issues have been processing. Recently, cloud computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google introduced the possible solution that is Function as a Service. The paper aimed to examine whether FaaS can be improved application backend via integrating FaaS architecture into Microservices architecture. For implementation, two prototypes were designed. One is the prototype of Microservices backend was implemented. The other is Microservices combined with FaaS that some of services in the prototype of Microservices were changed to FaaS via Kubeless framework, one of Serverless framework. The result of benchmarking both prototypes was that Microservices performed better than Microservices combined with FaaS in terms of backend performance. On the other hands, CPU and memory usage and development cycle was more efficient in Microservice combined with FaaS than Microservices. To summarize, FaaS did not improve backend performance but improve CPU and memory usage and development cycle. Therefore, readers need to consider which point is important in their use case to decide incorporating FaaS into their system.