Why going serverless may prove to be better for your business?

Serverless is one of the latest trends that will continue to increase by leaps and bounds over the decade. Research from Globenewswire says that the global Serverless Architecture Market is expected to grow from USD 7,892.67 Million in 2020 to USD 21,912.56 Million by the end of 2025. The burgeoning rise is due to the core idea of moving the burden of provisioning and managing run-time environment on to function cloud. Also, Serverless computing can unlock teams’ capability, allowing them to focus on what they do best: delivering innovative customer experiences. 

What Does “Going Serverless” Mean?

Essentially, a serverless setup is one where everything is stored on the cloud, and all computing is done there, however they still require servers but not on your premise. This means you don’t have to manage the servers on your end, as the cloud provider allocates machine resources on-demand, taking care of the serverless applications on your behalf as you continue to expand or reduce your usage. Additionally, you do not need to worry about managing infrastructure, servers, recovery from downtime, and no disaster management is required, saving both your time and money. 

Why Should You Go Serverless?

Server-centric applications and programming can rapidly become overwhelming, particularly if you’re growing. You’ll need to add more servers and more resources to manage them, while making your application serverless can immediately speed up data processing and ease debugging. 

The Benefits of Going Serverless: Serverless computing is becoming more and more popular for a variety of reasons – 

Cost reduction – Reduced cost is a huge benefit when you choose to go Serverless. It costs quite a bit to maintain servers, and you may require a dedicated resource and sometimes an entire team to manage loads which is a huge cost in itself. But serverless provisioning is dynamic, exact, and takes place in real-time, so you don’t have to pay when the server is idle.

Scalability – In Serverless, if your app suddenly gets a spike in usage or faces low usage, the cloud platform provides more or less compute (and if needed, data store) units to the application, based on demand. You get billed only for the duration of your usage. In addition, your resources will scale up and down dynamically and natively. You do not need to optimize your auto-scaling settings and policies to manage the delicate tradeoff between availability and cost-efficiency. This is particularly attractive for jobs that run intermittently; but, it can also be a cost management solution for long-running jobs.

Resiliency – IT operations are one of the key metrics that an organization’s IT infrastructure is measured by. In a serverless architecture, each piece of business logic can be implemented as an individual micro service. This means that when one component such as an AWS Lambda function causes a regression, the overall impact on the application is minimal and can be restored quickly. With AWS Lambda, you get an almost infinite history of each lambda function via lambda versions. This means rollbacks are as easy as changing the reference to an earlier version, which does not even require a new deployment.

Security – Serverless architecture abstracts away the manual work of patching and OS updates, reducing the risk of human errors or delays in keeping the infrastructure up-to-date. There are no servers that would require access management (via SSH, for instance), taking away one more potential source of human error. 

Furthermore, each execution of a serverless function, by definition, is short-lived. There are no long-running processes, so while you would never want an unauthorized piece of code to access running memory, you also have a dramatically smaller window of opportunity since passwords or secrets in memory would not be exposed for a long time.

While there are some downsides to going serverless, the benefits tend to outweigh them. That’s why so many companies are making the switch now. From AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, to Azure Functions by Microsoft, IBM Cloud Functions, and Iron.io, there are so many choices in cloud-based computing to choose from.

Ultimately, serverless is a continuation of the revolution that we’ve seen over the past few years — and one that is uniquely well-suited to help technology leaders weather a time of disruption and change.