What Are the Limitations and Challenges of Serverless Architecture?

While Serverless architecture has many advantages, it also has some limitations and challenges that need to be reasonably evaluated based on business scenarios:

Main limitations:

1. Execution time limits

• Maximum execution time: AWS Lambda maximum 15 minutes, Azure Functions 10 minutes
• Impact: Not suitable for long-running tasks such as video processing, big data analysis

2. Cold start latency

• First call latency: Ranges from a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds
• Impact: Applications sensitive to latency (such as real-time communication, games) may not be applicable

3. Resource limits

• Memory limits: Usually maximum 10GB
• Disk space: /tmp directory usually limited to 512MB-10GB
• Concurrency limits: Account-level and function-level concurrency limits

4. State management

• Stateless nature: Cannot share state between function instances
• Impact: Need to rely on external storage services to manage state

5. Debugging difficulties

• Local environment differences: Local development environment may differ from cloud environment
• Debugging tool limitations: Cannot set breakpoints like traditional applications

6. Vendor lock-in

• Platform dependency: Significant differences between Serverless platforms of different cloud providers
• Migration costs: Migrating to other platforms requires code refactoring

7. Cost uncertainty

• Pay-as-you-go: Costs may exceed expectations in high concurrency scenarios
• Difficult to predict: Difficult to accurately predict actual usage and costs

Applicable scenarios:

• Event-driven applications
• API services
• Data processing pipelines
• Microservices architecture
• Scheduled tasks

Candidates should be able to reasonably evaluate the applicability of Serverless architecture based on business needs.