The rise of serverless computing has popularized serverless PHP and other solutions in the web development landscape. Serverless PHP is nothing but a PHP application that runs on a cloud-hosting server, holding multiple solutions.
Serverless PHP has brought many benefits to the developer community. For example, earlier, developers needed a hardware server to deploy their codes and set up their solutions on the Internet. Not only managing the server was a complex affair, but it was also expensive. Serverless PHP removes the hassle of managing the server due to the facilities provided by serverless computing platforms. Similarly, more benefits have led to an increase in the adoption of Serverless PHP.
Let’s explore them in detail.
1. Easy Server Deployment
Serverless PHP streamlines the deployment process. It enables backend developers to focus on developing applications rather than handling server complexities. Here is how serverless PHP simplifies the entire development and deployment process to benefit backend development:
- Automated Deployment Pipelines: You can hire dedicated PHP developers to integrate your serverless PHP application with automated deployment pipelines and popular CI/CD tools. Integrating these pipelines and tools can automate application testing and deployment, saving time and costs.
- Blue/Green Deployment Strategies: Blue/Green deployment strategies help you deploy a new version of your application alongside the existing one. These strategies help test and validate the new version effectively before routing traffic to the latest version.
- Redeployment of Older Version: New application versions can show errors and other vulnerabilities after deployment. In such cases, serverless PHP applications can roll back to the older version, ensuring stability and minimizing the impact of deployment-related issues.
- Templates and Pre-configured Settings: Serverless frameworks like the Serverless, AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model), and Zappa offer templates and pre-configured settings. These templates and settings are designed for faster and more convenient deployment of serverless PHP applications.
- Testing and Staging Support: Many serverless platforms offer built-in support for testing and staging environments. These environments preview how your application works after testing so that you can deploy a performance-optimized application. This ensures an error-free app deployment and a smoother user experience.
- Version Control System Integration: You can integrate version control systems into your serverless PHP application to track code changes. This can help deploy code changes easily and flexibly.
2. Event-driven Architecture
Serverless PHP applications have an event-driven architecture. That means the serverless PHP architecture interprets user actions or events and triggers the PHP code to run. This architecture simplifies responsive and scalable solution development in the following ways:
- Asynchronous Processing: This architecture can process events asynchronously. Hence, it lets functions handle events at their own pace, leading to improved system performance and reduced bottlenecks.
- Event Sources: This architecture provides numerous event sources for triggering events. Some examples of such event sources include cloud storage events, HTTP endpoints, IoT devices, message queues, and more. These sources help you to build interconnected and versatile solutions that can respond to events from various sources.
- Fault Tolerance: Event-driven architecture offers error handling and retry functions to handle errors and execution failure. Hence, due to its fault-tolerant nature, event-driven architecture enhances your backend’s reliability.
- Modular and Microservices Architecture: Event-driven serverless architectures follow a modular and microservice-based approach for developing backends. Hence, you can use its collection of independent functions (each having a responsibility and serving a specific task) to develop your backend. So, rather than transforming the entire solution, you can change the specific modular components for easier development, deployment, and maintenance.
- Easy State Management: In traditional server-based architectures, you must manage states across multiple sessions. On the other hand, in a serverless architecture, each function has a well-defined scope and serves a particular event, resulting in simplified state management. Furthermore, event-driven functions operate statelessly, delivering cleaner and maintainable codes.
3. Greater Cost Savings
Serverless PHP ensures cost-effective backend development in the following ways:
- Pay-as-you-go Pricing Models: With serverless PHP, you only pay for the server resources you use. Simply put, serverless platforms charge you based on your PHP function’s execution time and utilized resources. Therefore, you can save on server costs when your PHP code is not running.
- Optimized Resource Allocation: Serverless computing provides you with the right number of resources for your PHP code execution. Therefore, you no longer have to guess and select your required resources, leading to greater cost savings.
- Reduced Operational Costs: Serverless PHP eliminates the requirement of a dedicated team for server management and maintenance. It handles operations like server maintenance, security patches, updates, and more, so you can further save on operational costs.
- Resource Reusability: Serverless PHP reuses resources for frequently used functions. This reusability of resources reduces the time these functions take to execute after calling into use or cold start latency. Furthermore, reduced cold start latency can reduce costs and ensure proper resource usage.
4. Infinite Scaling Opportunities
Serverless PHP holds the following scaling facilities that optimize backend development:
- Automated Scaling: Serverless PHP applications automatically allocate required resources and manage servers to handle fluctuating traffic. Therefore, serverless PHP applications ensure flexible handling of heavy workloads with optimal performance.
- Load Balancing: Serverless PHP applications evenly distribute incoming requests across available function instances. This distribution prevents the overloading of a single instance and ensures efficient request processing.
Conclusion
Serverless PHP applications have the potential to revolutionize the web development landscape. However, there are some key factors that you should keep in mind while developing a new serverless PHP application or migrating an existing one to this framework. You must assess the complexity of the application, the components’ time criticality, and future scalability opportunities. By sticking to all these important factors, you can leverage the full potential of serverless PHP for the best results.
