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We at Virto DevLabs believe that for any toolkit, its functionality versus cost should be the starting point. Professional developers, for example, are rather skeptical about codeless / low-code platforms because of a few drawbacks:
Azure Logic Apps welcome screen
“The term “serverless” is deceiving in itself.
It can be attributed more to marketing
rather than technology in the cloud-hosting market.
In fact, all serverless applications run on servers anyway.
Often these are the same servers you can rent
as virtual machines or as dedicated, ”bare-metal” ones
”
Image source: Microsoft (with FaaS added by the author)
The main advantage of going serverless is that it can reduce your infrastructure costs, especially for ecommerce stores. There are three ways this can happen:
What are your options if you want to rebuild an existing B2B ecommerce platform using serverless computing?
There's no one right answer here. It depends on how much work needs to be done in order for the application code not only to run, but also to be optimized specifically toward providers like AWS Lambda or Microsoft Azure Functions (or similar). The general consensus is that starting by redesigning things would make more sense because there won't already exist any published libraries that can help speed up development time significantly.
Since development work is very expensive, the first step is always to assess whether your ecommerce application could work as serverless without any code changes. That would be the best solution for the pilot phase, when a company can evaluate the pros and cons of serverless computing for its business.
You can build your ecommerce application on a serverless architecture, but you will need to be prepared for the project. Many of today's commercially available platforms that are built as monolithic applications won't launch with this model because they were designed before it was popularized by companies like Facebook and Amazon Web Services (AWS). You should investigate Azure Functions or AWS Lambda if you want an easy way into hosting remotely, and look at local providers as well.
In our blog article, How We Launched Virto Commerce B2B eCommerce Platform in Serverless Mode on Azure Functions, we fully describe preparing our B2B platform back end for running in serverless mode. This experiment was successful, but further developments are needed to make the Virto Commerce Serverless platform available as a commercial product.
“ In software development slang,storefront applications are called “heads"
and what's done in the back-end system as the "body".
This is what “headless” means.
”
Headless is a technologically advanced and creative way to tackle the challenges of omnichannel sales. It helps avoid any disruption in synchronicity among channels, as well as provides more options for customers' UX. Headless has many advantages over monoliths; let's name three of the top ones.
Codeless and low-code development are becoming more popular because they can be faster and easier alternatives than traditional software development. But be aware that in today's reality, these tools cannot replace a team of programmers because their experience helps them take advantage of low-code visual editors in comparison to non-professional users. Consider using codeless or low-code development to simplify the process of building new features for applications that require regular software updates.
Serverless computing is a prominent way to simplify the development process by taking away the need to manage servers. Serverless computing removes the requirements for developers to worry about server management, capacity planning, or scaling issues. Serverless applications are typically event-driven, meaning they only run when an event is triggered.
Today's front-end technologies are changing at a much faster rate than back ends, which means you will need to update your technology more often. Headless architecture allows you to keep up with this pace and avoid having outdated software that could frustrate users, keeping them engaged while they shop on your site.