BaaS vs FaaS: Differences Between Two Serverless Architectures

The contemporary stage of technological development finally made serverless architectures happen. These models help to build and execute applications and possess numerous advantages to companies, including

• Perfect business implementations and control of infrastructure
• Keeping a better level of management
• Compliance with uptime requirements, plan availability, and SLAs
• Minimizing operational expenses and better budgeting
• Utilizing applications and services from third parties
• Excludes extra personal engagement

Relying on third parties, serverless architectures help organizations effectively manage their computing environment, delivering the needed pieces of code for a reasonable price.

In this article, we’ll reveal the peculiarities of two main serverless architectures, known as BaaS (Backend as a Service) and FaaS (Function as a Service). These two cloud computing services serve different aims and have a diverse set of advantages and disadvantages.

We’ll guide you through BaaS vs FaaS comparison in this article.

Executive Summary

This FaaS vs. BaaS overview demonstrates the key strengths and weaknesses of these two serverless architectures. Our aim is to let you make a more informed decision on picking a BaaS or FaaS model that will take the load of complex and time-consuming server-side tasks. Also, we will provide examples of BaaS and FaaS to show you how these serverless architectures cope with real-life challenges.

As a BaaS serverless provider, Acropolium has vast experience and portfolio-proven expertise in delivering backend as a service to different industries. Here, we’ll present our vision on high-quality BaaS services you can request from your tech partner and reveal all the pros and cons of BaaS and FaaS models.

The table to compare BaaS vs FaaS models

Differences between BaaS and FaaS

Mainly, the difference between BaaS and FaaS is the purpose of adoption.

BaaS deals with backend functionality as a whole, but FaaS addresses microservices in applications only, responding to the events that occur. In other words, backend functionality is a constant thing, but microservices are certain events that appear from time to time and need a quick reaction. That’s why the set of technologies that make BaaS and FaaS work is so different.

Among other differences between FaaS and BaaS, unequal functionality complexity is striking.

Since BaaS addresses numerous backend frameworks, it contains the necessary pieces of code to build push notifications, geolocation, email verification, and many other functions.

In its turn, FaaS is capable of dealing with simple events only. It cannot address complex tasks but provides the needed speed and accuracy in managing microservices.

What is BaaS (Backend as a Service)

In essence, BaaS is an innovative cloud model widely adopted for developing mobile apps and websites alike. This third-party service is the set of tailor-made backend features, providing the basis for fully functioning applications that need only frontend maintenance. This way, the execution model saves time for your team for numerous other tasks rather than testing and deployment.

Among the concrete functions backend developers can deliver quickly — BaaS offers assistance to database management, push notifications, user authentication. Being applicable to game apps, single-page applications, websites, chatbots, and various industrial apps, it grants you access to a bundled infrastructure with ready-to-use APIs and SDKs behind. With this service, you can forget about your app’s server-side tasks and dedicate more time to business-critical tasks.

Recently, there appeared mBaaS, or mobile Backend as a Service, that addresses the backend tasks for mobile application development. Like classic BaaS, mBaaS lets you maintain only the frontend part, totally supporting the backend services in a mobile app.

Pros of BaaS

The greatest advantage of BaaS is saving time on frontend.

Earlier, companies had no choice but to invest resources heavily in both backend and front development. But with BaaS services, it’s possible to reduce your workload at least by half, leading to productivity gains and higher ROI. By providing cost-effective solutions for a full-fledged infrastructure, BaaS lets you spend less time on backend and concentrate on more complicated software development tasks.

Also, it lets you outsource backend tasks to BaaS provider. In practice, it means faster development and unnecessary to deploy backend features from scratch. What’s more, you can manage two great issues at once: scaling cloud infrastructure and accelerating backend development. With BaaS supporting your backend, you can address critical tasks in business and technological aspects more efficiently.

Cons of BaaS

Notwithstanding its applicability, BaaS has limited flexibility. Like any tailor-made solution, this service is not adjustable as custom coding. Some packages and platforms offer the ability to add your own feature to overcome this limitation, though. In any case, getting a high-quality BaaS is the point of carefully picking the solution that suits your business aims right away.

Top BaaS Providers

On the market, several tech providers are offering high-quality BaaS services. In this section, we’ll briefly present some of them. In our blog, you can find a full list of the best serverless backend providers in 2021-2022. And remember the main rule: don’t just fall for loud names. Your choice of a BaaS vendor must come from your needs and nothing else.

Acropolium

Acropolium possesses years of experience in delivering web and mobile solutions, which lets the company understand the typical business requests and standard functions. To sum it up, the tech vendor has created its own BaaS platform with a set of pre-built blocks. It increases the effectiveness of app development and allows creating business processes with client storage isolated. Clients can build websites, craft SaaS solutions, create builders, and manage workflows with the platform.

Firebase

As a cross-platform solution from Google, Firebase supports many projects from this search engine giant and lists several demanded backend features, including analytics, authentication, and push notifications. The special set of functions from Firebase includes ready-to-use APIs from text recognition, landmark recognition, and image labeling. You need to create a Firebase project to start interacting with this BaaS provider.

Kinvey

Kinvey, which has been titled Progress Kinvey since 2017, delivers a package solution for BaaS. Inside, they offer serverless platform architecture, chatbot toolset, data pipeline, and a native multi-channel for code reusing. You can start a trial period or pay a full plan for $200 per month.

Backendless

Backendless is an open-source SDK with limited BaaS functionality. However, you can customize this solution and develop extra features on your own. Local and cloud hosting allows you to get authentication, social login, push notification, geofencing, data import and export, and analytics. The payment plans are different, depending on the number of features available.

Read also: Cloud computing for Healthcare explained.

What is FaaS (Function as a Service)

FaaS is a serverless approach with ready-made pieces of code. It’s useful for developers to work on the fly or respond to the events and provide microservices.

The platform enables running self-contained functions (or already designed code snippets) in the cloud. Being an event-based model, FaaS frees your developers from executing the code and lets them work on other important tasks.

Pros of FaaS

The greatest strength of FaaS is at scaling code at the highest cost-effectiveness. With the already designed codes, you can save significant resources on creating them from scratch.

Also, FaaS is useful for the real-time processing of data. Thanks to this service, your developers don’t need to interact with page elements to update the code. All they need is to pick a temporarily running container in the existing pod. These ephemeral containers provide smooth user integrations and manage workloads and troubleshooting optimally.

Cons of FaaS

Notwithstanding its scalability and speed, FaaS doesn’t address the core business aims of your business. It can help you maintain and manage some micro-events, but it does not apply to complex backend tasks.

Also, the FaaS platforms, by automatically running your code without asking you for provision, create a sense of the lack of control. This is especially critical in crisis events when the company has to get manual access to the infrastructure.

Top FaaS Providers

Azure, Google, and AWS are the biggest FaaS providers that concentrate on configurability. It means that their services are closely linked to other parts of their ecosystem. That involves a significant level of generality and calls for choosing based on the exact system you already use in your company.

AWS Lambda

This serverless compute service from Amazon lets you run code without provisioning and managing servers. The set of benefits includes the complete absence of servers to manage, continuous scaling, cost optimization with millisecond metering, and consistent performance at any scale. If you want to start using this FaaS solution, you should sign up for an AWS account, explore tutorials, and visit the AWS Management Console to start building.

Azure Cloud Functions

Azure Functions lets you speed up and simplify serverless app development with serverless computing. This event-driven platform can solve complex orchestration problems that appear in your Azure computing environment. The set of functions includes automated and flexible scaling based on your workload volume, integrated programming volume based on triggers and bindings, end-to-end development experience, and a variety of programming languages and hosting options. All in all, Azure lets you create reliable serverless applications with built-in security and monitoring.

Google Cloud Functions

This service lets you treat all Google and third-party cloud services as building blocks, running your code with zero server management. The features include simplified developer experience and increased developer velocity, pay only for what you use, and avoidance of lock-in with open technology. The exact pricing for this FaaS solution depends on how long your function runs, how many times you use it, and how many resources you provision.

“When using BaaS, developers can concentrate on the business logic and only work on the parts that make money, without bothering with the tech underlayers,” explains Acropolium’s CEO Oleksii Glib.

Read also: Best cloud computing platforms to choose for your product.

Why Choose BaaS over FaaS

In simple words, having building blocks and code generation tools for your backend as a whole is always better than simply knowing how to manage micro-events. That’s why the question of choosing backend-as-a-service or function-as-a-service has a straightforward answer.

It’s better to pick BaaS because it addresses more complex tasks and delivers more sophisticated results.

The business advantages of BaaS include greater productivity and outsourcing a huge amount of tasks related to cloud management. Generally, getting the platform is cheaper than hiring a skilled backend engineer, not to mention the faster time to market a hired professional cannot always guarantee.

For example, a BaaS provider managed to save $500k for a Vantage SaaS company.

For reaching the maximum benefit from picking BaaS over FaaS, ensure your tech vendor can deliver this list of components:

• APIs
• Database
• Cloud Code Functions
• Infrastructure
• Content Delivery Network
• Caching
• Geolocation
• User authentication
• Third-party integrations
• Social integration
• Push notifications
• Data management

In addition, check if a serverless vendor is compliant with GDPR and HIPAA. Otherwise, choosing BaaS over FaaS will not bring you benefits. That’s why we encourage you to make a BaaS and FaaS providers comparison to pick the service that will fully address your needs.

BaaS Development: Use Case from Acropolium

BaaS services are applicable to several industries, including wellness. A German startup promoting a healthy lifestyle requested a social media app from us. Acropolium accepted the challenge and developed a stress-less app, a mobile cross-platform social network app that discards all possible stressful experiences.

The main problem for this project was a technical backend debt from previous vendors who left low-quality code and the absence of product documentation. Acropolium addressed this issue with architecture and code optimization, for which BaaS services were handy in terms of low cost and ability to meet deadlines.

As a result, the client got an effective wellness social media mobile app that reduced software engineering costs by 40% and cut the costs of mobile development twice. It helps iOS and Android clients maintain their health and reach up-to-date and accurate content from the media world in an easy-to-use manner.

Read also: Best cloud cost optimization strategies.

Contact Acropolium for BaaS Services!

Reach Acropolium to get BaaS development services without behind-the-scenes management! With us, you can get backend as a service that matches your business goals and lets you front-end developers reveal their best without the need to struggle with low-code backend.

BaaS development solutions from Acropolium will help you save up to 75% on the costs and accelerate the time to market twice! This solution is suitable for 95% of apps and comes at uncompromised security and high scalability.

The greatest advantage of our BaaS development is the ability to deliver easy-to-use, ready-made, and understandable code libraries which your backend developers can start using right away. It’s sufficient for creating almost all the apps on the market. Everything needed is to write frontend code on the existing building blocks and code generation tools.

BaaS services from Acropolium are applicable to scalable database management, cloud storage, user authentication, push notifications, hosting, APIs, email verification, geolocation, gateway, and infrastructure. The list of industrial solutions we’ve already delivered is also wide, including an addiction recovery mobile app, dental clinic mobile app, location-based social network app, and restaurant chatbot.

Get our consultation on BaaS implementation now! Acropolium experts are ready to answer all your questions and guide you through the development process.