The renowned Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider, Twilio has launched a beta version of its Serverless coding platform under the name "Twilio Functions". Functions allows developers to build and run Twilio applications much faster so that the apps can go in production really quickly.
Source: twilio.com
In the
official blog, the company has stated that the Twilio Functions is launched to eliminate a couple of issues faced with the server based app development, such as – the problem of scaling when the application gets unexpected hits, or problem of just testing a prototype release before committing to release it publicly.
Twilio describes Functions as,
“Functions are lightweight, event-triggered pieces of code that run in the cloud and scale automatically to support your user base. Using Functions, you can build production-ready Twilio applications that respond to Twilio events, mint Access Tokens, and invoke the REST API – all without needing to stand up or scale a web server.”
How the Twilio Functions works is that developers write their code in JavaScript and Twilio executes it in a standard Node.js environment that runs on Twilio’s infrastructure. All the Twilio Services run in the Twilio Runtime that brings along the helper libraries, API keys, preconfigured assets and debugging tools.
If we talk about cost, the Functions service is surprisingly very cheap - You only pay for the resources you actually use.
Source: twilio.com
You pay nothing for first 10,000 invocations, and after that you just pay $0.0001 per request. That makes $1 for another 10,000 requests. Not only this, the company indicates that they can offer you better rates depending on the volume of invocations you get. If you want to use the Twilio service just for hosting the static files, you can do that too on the same pricing model.