If you are reading this post it means you are in the right place for content about Tencent Cloud. In this blog post, I will go through the Tencent Cloud Serverless ecosystem. I am assuming you know what serverless means and what are the benefits, features and use cases.
Despite of being a very popular and trendy topic nowadays, there is a lot of confusion about what serverless really means, since serverless does not mean that there is no server, it is just that you do not need to care about the underlying resources. What is a real evidence is that the acceptance and use of serverless technologies are constantly increasing. In the same way, the serverless ecosystem is continuously developing, becoming more versatile, flexible, and robust.
Tencent Cloud Serverless Framework
Tencent Cloud and Serverless announced their partnership a few months ago. Their goal is to join forces to bring the serverless movement to China.
The Serverless Framework helps you develop and deploy your Tencent SCF (Serverless Cloud Function), along with the Tencent infrastructure resources they require. It’s a CLI that offers structure, automation and best practices out-of-the-box, allowing you to focus on building sophisticated, event-driven, serverless architectures, comprised of Functions and Events.
You can find the official Serverless documentation here.
Tencent Cloud Serverless Ecosystem
Tencent Cloud has emerged as a major player when it comes to serverless capabilities. Tencent Cloud offers plenty of the tools required by enterprises in order to start their serverless journey.
Serverless Cloud Function is the core serverless computing product offered by Tencent Cloud. However, there are many other serverless products, such as Elastic Kubernetes Service, API Gateway, Cloud Object Storage (COS), and more.
Serverless Cloud Function
Serverless Cloud Function (SCF) is the Tencent Cloud Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) product, an event-driven and fully-managed compute service. SCF enables to build and run applications without having to purchase and manage servers in an elastically and secure way. It is very easy to use, simply write the core code in a language supported (Python, Node.js, PHP, Go, Java, and Custom Runtime) by the platform and set the conditions for code execution.
SCF works exactly in the same way as other managed serverless products in other cloud service providers. SCF executes a function on your behalf when an event is triggered, allocates resources, and launches and manages the container. The SCF platform is essentially responsible for the whole process and the infrastructure behind it, so you can focus on the code.
Keep in mind that it takes a little bit of time for the container to start, which adds some delay each time a function is invoked. However, this delay is usually only perceivable when the function is invoked for the first time, updated, or invoked again after being idle for a long time because the platform tries to reuse the container for subsequent invocations in order to minimize the container launch delay. After the function is invoked, the container will be retained for a period of time according to the platform conditions for use in the next invocation, during which a new invocation will directly reuse the container.
In terms of billing and pricing, SCF is billed monthly and you only pay for what you use. The bill consists of resource usage fees, call fees, and outgoing traffic. You can get detailed information on pricing here.
Elastic Kubernetes Service
Tencent Cloud Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a fully-managed Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE) service mode that allows you to deploy workloads eliminating the need for you to manage any compute nodes. EKS is compatible with native Kubernetes, allowing you to purchase and manage resources natively, it also supports the latest Kubernetes version as well as native Kubernetes cluster management. It is ready-to-use and very well integrated with other Tencent Cloud products such as storage, networking, and more.
EKS is billed based on the actual amount of resources used by containers, ensuring higher resource utilization and lower operations costs. Flexible and efficient auto-scaling ensures that EKS only consumes the amount of resources required by the current load. You can get detailed information on pricing here.
API Gateway
API Gateway is an API hosting service that enables full lifecycle management of APIs, including creation, maintenance, release, operation, and deactivation. It is very easy to use and easy to maintain. It can be used to encapsulate your business so you can securely release your data, business logic, and functionality for system integration and partner connections.
The API Gateway is billed based on the number of API calls made and the traffic generated in a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Cloud Object Storage
Tencent Cloud Cloud Object Storage (COS) is the classical cloud storage service provided by any cloud provider. Highly secure, highly available, cost-effective, and fully-managed by Tencent Cloud. Very well integrated with other Tencent Cloud services.
Commonly used for application data storage, content distribution, big data analysis, and disaster recovery and backup.
Cloud Message Queue
Cloud Message Queue (CMQ) is a distributed message queue service with a reliable message-based async communication mechanism provided by Tencent Cloud. CMQ enables message receiving/sending among different applications and stores the messages in queues to prevent message loss.
CMQ is widely used in big data fields such as log collection, monitoring data aggregation, streaming data processing, and online and offline analysis. It has become an indispensable part of the big data ecosystem.
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