An Analysis of Serverless Computing in Scalable Web Development

Abstraction: Modern web technologies have encouraged developers to embrace cloud-based infrastructures that can scale with growing user demands, improve application availability, and reduce infrastructure complexity. Traditional web applications typically use continually running servers that require configuration, maintenance, capacity planning, and manual or separately configured scaling. While these approaches offer a high degree of control over execution environments, they may incur overheads and inefficiencies, especially with varying traffic levels. With serverless architecture, developers can deploy on cloud platforms that take care of much of the underlying infrastructure. Web applications commonly make use of Function as a Service (FaaS), which executes independently deployable functions in response to events, and Backend as a Service (BaaS), which manages capabilities such as authentication, databases, storage, and messaging. Serverless computing does not mean that servers are not involved; rather, infrastructure provisioning and management are largely offloaded to the cloud provider (Baldini et al., 2017; Jonas et al., 2019). Despite its advantages, there are several technical and economic disadvantages to this approach. Automated scaling does not guarantee consistently low response times, and application performance can be limited by cold starts, network communication, function execution limits, and interdependent distributed services. Transferring application components to managed cloud platforms increases reliance on a particular provider and makes workloads with unpredictable usage harder to estimate costs for (Eivy, 2017; Eismann et al., 2021). The central research problem addressed in this study is the balance between scalability, performance, development efficiency, and operational control in serverless web applications. While the serverless approach can reduce responsibilities for infrastructure management, developers still have to make decisions about application decomposition, state management, monitoring, security, and service integration. Therefore, it is important to understand the benefits and limitations of this architecture in order to choose a serverless or traditional approach for modern web applications. The purpose of this study is to examine how serverless architectures contribute to scalable and efficient web development. It focuses on their conceptual foundations, scalability and performance characteristics, effects on development practices, and operational challenges. The discussion centers around the conditions under which serverless architecture makes sense and where traditional or hybrid cloud architectures may be more practical.