Microservices vs serverless: A performance comparison on a cloud-native web application

A microservices architecture has gained higher popularity among enterprises due to its agility, scalability, and resiliency. However, serverless computing has become a new trendy topic when designing cloud-native applications. Compared to the monolithic and microservices, serverless architecture offloads management and server configuration from the user to the cloud provider and let the user focus only on the product development. Hence, there are debates regarding which deployment strategy to use. This research provides a performance comparison of a cloud-native web application in terms of scalability, reliability, cost, and latency when deployed using microservices and serverless deployment strategy. This research shows that neither the microservices nor serverless deployment strategy fits all the scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that each type of deployment strategy has its advantages under different scenarios. The microservice deployment strategy has a cost advantage for long-lasting services over serverless. On the other hand, a request accompanied by the large size of the response is more suitably handled by serverless because of its scaling-agility.