Is your business ready to go serverless?
The Gartner report from April 2018, An I&O Leader’s Guide to Serverless Computing, shows that by 2020, more than 20% of global enterprises will have deployed serverless computing technologies. Let’s look to see what all this buzz around going serverless and is worth the trouble.
What is serverless computing?
Serverless computing “is an emerging software architecture pattern that promises to eliminate the need for infrastructure provisioning and management”. But despite its name, serverless computing is not about the elimination of servers from distributed applications; those servers still exist, they are just managed by the cloud providers. By doing so, the developers can focus solely on their code, without concerning themselves with the underlying infrastructure. It just gets better and better, right?
Positive outcomes of going serverless
Going serverless will definitely attract those less tech-savvy clients that want to host their websites but there are so much more benefits for your business.
Lower operational costs
When going serverless, you no longer need to manage the server, so there are no maintenance costs. Additionally, when you’re just starting out and volumes are not too high, the costs are not that high since you are charged based on usages like API Calls or Function invocation. Basically, you pay only for what you use, there is no need to pay a monthly fee to hire a server like in the traditional way.
Increased productivity for the developers
With serverless computing, developers can focus on the application instead of worrying about the infrastructure not working. This means not only increased productivity for the developers but also lower development costs as the backend infrastructure engineers are no longer needed.
Easy packaging and deployment
Compared to the traditional web server’s complex process of packaging and deploying an application, serverless architecture normally just requires you to package the code in a compressed file and upload it via a Console or submit via an API Call. This entire process can be automated.
Is it difficult to go serverless?
Despite all its benefits, not running your own server or controlling your own server-side logic can have its drawbacks as well. In addition to reduced overall control, you are also open to vendor lock-in, which means that your code has to be designed to fit that system, these strict constraints affecting how flexible and customized your own systems can be. To make things worse, if you ever decide to change providers, that will also impact your budget as you will have to bear the costs of upgrading your systems to adhere to the new vendor’s specifications.
Is going serverless the future for the business world?
According to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report, serverless is the fastest-growing cloud service model right now, with an annual growth rate of 75%. However, like any emerging technology, it is still received with a certain degree of skepticism, in spite of all its multiple positive outcomes. The future is still uncertain but at this stage, it is probably safe to assume that serverless computing is going to play a major role in the upcoming years.
