Serverless Architectures vs Virtual Machines

Developers should use serverless architectures when building event-driven applications, APIs, or microservices that require high scalability, cost efficiency, and minimal operational management meets developers should learn and use virtual machines to create isolated, reproducible environments for testing applications across different operating systems without needing separate physical hardware, which is crucial for cross-platform development and ci/cd pipelines. Here's our take.

Serverless Architectures

Nice Pick

Developers should use serverless architectures when building event-driven applications, APIs, or microservices that require high scalability, cost efficiency, and minimal operational management

Pros

• It is ideal for workloads with variable or unpredictable traffic, such as web backends, data processing pipelines, or IoT applications, as it eliminates the need to provision and maintain servers, reducing time-to-market and infrastructure costs
• Related to: aws-lambda, azure-functions

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Virtual Machines

Developers should learn and use Virtual Machines to create isolated, reproducible environments for testing applications across different operating systems without needing separate physical hardware, which is crucial for cross-platform development and CI/CD pipelines

Pros

• They are also essential for running legacy systems securely, optimizing resource utilization in cloud computing, and ensuring consistency in deployment scenarios, such as in DevOps practices
• Related to: hypervisor, containerization

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Serverless Architectures is a concept while Virtual Machines is a platform. We picked Serverless Architectures based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Serverless Architectures wins

Based on overall popularity. Serverless Architectures is more widely used, but Virtual Machines excels in its own space.