International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 12 Issue: 04 | Apr 2025
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
www.irjet.net
A Review of Comparative Study of Serverless Computing and Virtual Machines in Cloud Environments Isha Srivastava1, Deepshikha2 1Master of Technology, Computer Science and Engineering, Lucknow Institute of Technology, Lucknow, India 2Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lucknow Institute of Technology,
Lucknow, India ---------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract - Two important paradigms of cloud computing
services over the internet instead of relying on existing on premises infrastructures. Cloud computing started from the turn of the century when virtualization technologies powered the evolution of cloud computing as well through the use of virtual machines (VM). As the time progressed, cloud models like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) were developed based on different level of abstraction and control. Today, serverless computing (Function as a Service, or FaaS) has arrived – infrastructure management being abstracted exactly while developers are not allowed to concentrate on the execution of code. In cloud, resource management and deployment plays an important role, economic cost, scalability, and operational efficiency directly depend on it.
are serverless computing and virtual machines (VMs), which have advantages and tradeoffs to deploy modern applications. A systematic, comparative analysis from the aspects of architecture, performance, cost-efficiency, scalability, security and workload suitability for serverless computing and VMs in cloud environment is conducted in this review paper. We first provide definition and illustration of serverless computing (such as eventdriven Function-as-a-Service models) and VMs (such as hypervisorbased virtualization) along with description of their own strengths and weaknesses. Major discoveries point out that serverless computing presents itself best for high scalability scenarios, low management overheads, and pay per use cost models and is fit for event driven microservices and workloads with short duration. On the other hand, VMs offer greater control of the infrastructure, and good compatibility with legacy systems and consistent performances for long running applications, at a cost of increased resource cost and higher management complexity. The paper presents context specific tradeoffs and use case through real world case studies (e.g., AWS Lambda vs EC2 instance). Serverless cold starts, VM resource underutilization and vendor lock in are been critically examined. Future directions are discussed with emerging trends such as hybrid architectures, and AI driven resource optimization. Finally, the review makes actionable recommendations for practitioners on how to choose an optimal model among the offered models based on the workload characteristics and specific cost and scalability demands. Motivated by this goal, we present a synthesis of information to help practitioners in the clouds, and the researchers that are beginning to study them, understand the potential roles that this emerging technology may play in the near future, and what those roles imply for the development of next generation applications.
Figure-1: Server vs VMs vs Serverless.
1.2 Problem Statement Manual scaling and maintenance of these traditional cloud computing models such as VM based architectures cause resource underuse, over provisioning as well as high operational overhead. On the one hand, VMs are flexible but tend to find fulfilling the needs of dynamic, event driven workloads difficult. However, serverless computing claims to alleviate the hassle of scaling through automatic scaling as well as cost efficiency; but casts limitations including limited control of runtime, and latency concerns (e.g, starting from cold). To help organizations select the best of the solutions for different workloads, it is imperative to evaluate these paradigms systematically.
Key Words: Serverless computing, Virtual Machines (VMs), Cloud computing, FaaS, IaaS, Scalability, Costefficiency, Comparative analysis.
1.INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background and Context The cloud computing has disrupted businesses by allowing them to leverage scalable and on demand
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