Serverless Development vs Virtual Machines

Developers should learn serverless development for building scalable, cost-effective applications with minimal operational overhead, especially for event-driven workloads like APIs, data processing, or IoT backends 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 Development

Nice Pick

Developers should learn serverless development for building scalable, cost-effective applications with minimal operational overhead, especially for event-driven workloads like APIs, data processing, or IoT backends

Pros

• It's ideal for microservices, batch jobs, and scenarios with unpredictable traffic, as it eliminates the need to provision or scale servers manually, reducing costs through pay-per-use pricing models
• 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 Development is a methodology while Virtual Machines is a platform. We picked Serverless Development based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Serverless Development wins

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