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There's a big difference between Paas, where you hand over control of your backend. Compared to Faas, where you just outsource a small part of your infrastructu

There's a big difference between Paas, where you hand over control of your backend. Compared to Faas, where you just outsource a small part of your infrastructure. FaaS solutions like algolia, getsentry, getstream.io. mapbox, layer, keen.io, twilio, stripe etc only run a small part of your application. They scale well, are more reliable and often more cost-effective than an in-house solution. If you're ever not happy with them it's easy to switch to an alternative. If Algolia no longer works for you, simply switch to Elastic. If you're not happy with Mapbox, use google maps. No longer like, getstream.io, use Stream-Framework. It's relatively easy to change since you're not handing over your entire backend. Also see my post on HighScalability about this: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/12/22/scalability-as-a-service.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/12/22/scalability-as-a-...

nostrademons 10y ago
Twilio, Stripe, etc. aren't what the article is referring to as FaaS (which, incidentally, I've never heard of outside this article but seems pretty descriptive). They're talking about things like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Parse Cloud Code, where you write code that runs on a third-party service. The entry & exit points of the code are under the control of hosting provider, which distinguishes it from PaaS, where they normally take a well-known platform that'd work fine on your laptop and then perform hosting and administration. Think of it as the API vs SPI distinction that we used to have back in Windows-land. API-only services like Twilio or Stripe are usually just called SaaS.
nickbauman 10y ago
With the downside being the lack of cohesion with the rest of your system(s).