Why Should Enterprises Move to Serverless Computing?

Sudeep Srivastava December 29, 2023

Technology is revolutionizing at a relatively faster pace and pressurizing companies to use new technology in tough competition. It becomes essential to cope with delivery demand and maintenance from a technology perspective to expand a company’s business offerings or services. The transition from on-premise hardware to cloud computing works like a charm for several business leaders in understanding digital workflows and service delivery. Hence, serverless computing is gaining rampant traction from executives worldwide.

A closer look at serverless cloud computing will detail numerous business benefits for companies to adopt such practices. It is clear why more organizations are considering and adopting serverless structures as they head into one of the most skeptical decades. The article will list the potential aspects of serverless computing with real-life implementation. Let’s get started!

What is Serverless Computing?

Although business and IT leaders know about on-premise hardware, serverless might confuse people who have spent decades managing server use and capacity. For instance, serverless computing doesn’t explicitly mean servers aren’t involved, but they eliminate the need for businesses to manage, own, or lease their own servers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is known for introducing Functions as a Service (FaaS) for the first time, also known as Serverless technology. The ‘as a service’ view also incorporates Backend as a Service (BaaS), referring to cloud computing in business.

Serverless takes its inspiration from the original cloud business model, where virtual machines are leased to a provider. However, it requires companies to lease a pre-decided amount over a set period. In a gradual shift to enterprise cloud computing, organizations pay only for the memory an application’s code takes and the amount of time. Serverless is a cloud computing model that performs automatic execution of computer resources, scales resources up or down, and scales them to zero when the application is not running.

Who Should Consider Going Serverless and Why?

For any enterprise, the primary concern is to reduce the effort and cost involved in managing and maintaining servers. It is indeed a daunting task for every enterprise to have on-premise hardware. Unfortunately, the resources needed to scale capacity are often slow for most companies. In its recent article, Forbes stated a report that found 80% of IT architects had to scale back ambitions for mobile applications because of the challenges in using data.

Serverless architecture aims to solve the present business challenges by transforming how enterprises operate. Instead of opting for cloud space or on-premise hardware, developers can choose to go serverless for accessing the memory on a pay-as-you-go basis. It allows developers to design and build applications with increased agility at a lower cost.

A move to serverless technology eliminates IT infrastructure tasks like operating system maintenance, server provisioning, patching, etc. While there are cases where self-managed servers work best for a particular company, in other cases, a serverless architecture makes sense from a business and technical point of view.

As for which enterprises should choose a serverless services approach, businesses who want to decrease their go-to-market time and build lightweight, flexible applications will benefit greatly. It will help significantly reduce costs for applications that see inconsistent usage, respond when needed, and not incur charges when at rest.

What are the Potential Upsides and Downsides of Using Serverless Computing?

Potential Upsides and Downsides of Using Serverless Computing

Serverless computing has numerous benefits provided to companies, we have collated a list of of why one should consider going for a serverless Computing services:

Quick Deployment

The serverless architecture enables development teams to focus on writing code to compete in today’s world. It makes them free from managing infrastructure, removes a lot of complexity, and provides more time for innovation and optimization of the front-end application.

Seamless Scalability

As a server capacity does not limit companies, the serverless model boosts a company’s ability to scale services quickly. Also, a serverless solution is a polyglot environment, and it enables developers to choose any language or framework (Python, Java, node.js).

Greater Cost-efficiency

A company that doesn’t have to spend on keeping hardware devices helps to reduce infrastructure and operational costs dramatically. It also allows teams to adjust spending according to service needs. The company only has to pay for execution as the meter starts when the request is made and ends when execution finishes.

Better User-experience

Serverless cloud computing helps reduce the latency time between servers interacting for a faster and frictionless experience. In the case of parallel processing, serverless services can prove to be quicker and more cost-effective thus, helping in better user-experience. These are also the critical factors of user satisfaction and loyalty.

Accurate Resourcing

Serverless systems use a pay-as-you-go model for easy usage monitoring and matching business requirements. The model allows for greater transparency of costs and needs by providing near-total visibility into system and user times. Hence, it improves the accuracy of budgets and resource allocation.

As every coin has a second side, enterprise computing also has specific applications that make it unfavorable. However, there are fewer potential downsides of serverless computing, lets find out:

Cold Starts

Sometimes, serverless architectures scale up and down to zero; they also sometimes need to start from zero to serve a new request. Although this startup latency isn’t noticeable for specific applications, the delay is unacceptable for some organizations.

Monitoring and Debugging

Serverless architecture exacerbates the complexity in some organizations as teams may find it difficult or impossible to monitor or debug functions using existing tools or processes.

What are Some of the Use Cases for Serverless Computing?

Enterprise computing has a significant grip around mobile backends, microservices, and data and event stream processing. Let’s look at some real-world examples of how companies have implemented the tech front for their benefit.

Serverless and Microservices

Serverless architecture has received heavy praise in microservices architectures. The model is focused on creating small services that do a single job and communicate with one another using APIs. Even though some companies build microservices using either PaaS or containers, serverless has gained significant momentum because of rapid provisioning, inherent and automatic scaling, attributes around small bits of code, and a pricing model that never charges idle capacity.

API Backends

We can turn any action (or function) in a serverless platform into an HTTP endpoint ready to be consumed by web clients. When we enable them for the web, the actions get the name of web actions. After you have got web actions, one can assemble them into a full-featured API with an API gateway that brings additional security, rate limiting, custom domain support, and OAuth support.

Data Processing

Organizations that work with structured text, video data, audio, and image can harness the potential of serverless architecture. The tasks include data enrichment, transformation, validation, cleansing; PDF processing; video transcoding; audio normalization; image processing (rotation, sharpening, noise reduction, thumbnail generation), and optical character recognition (OCR).

Massively Parallel Compute (Map) Operations

Enterprise cloud computing is beneficial in parallel task processing, with each parallelizable task resulting in one action invocation. It shall include Map(-Reduce) operations and web scraping to business process automation, data search and processing (specifically Cloud Object Storage), hyperparameter tuning, Monte Carlo simulations, and genome processing.

For example, the Monte Carlo simulation ran over 160x faster on a serverless architecture than on a local machine.

serverless architecture

Stream Processing Workloads

Apache Kafka with FaaS and database offers a potent foundation for real-time buildouts of data pipelines and streaming apps. The architectures are ideal for working with data stream ingestions (for validation, cleansing, enrichment, transformation), including financial market data, IoT sensor data, business data streams, and application log data.

Internet of things (IoT) and Cloud Automation

Serverless computing has effectively captured the market of devices that connect to the internet to read or write data. Serverless is also witnessing heavy adoption in home automation and custom-built solutions. Lambda is also well suited for automating cloud tasks like changing configs, backing up databases, and taking care of periodical jobs.

What is Present in the Serverless Stack?

Serverless Stack

The serverless approach can be a guiding light in other core areas of the stack, such as:

1. Serverless databases and storage: A serverless process to these technologies involves transitioning away from provisioning instances with defined capacity, connection, and query limits and moving toward models that scale linearly with demand in infrastructure and pricing.

2. Event streaming and messaging: Enterprise computing works like a charm for stream-processing and event-driven workloads. For example, the open-source Apache Kafka event streaming platform.

3. API gateways: API gateways act as proxies to web actions and provide HTTP method routing, rate limits, client ID and secrets, CORS, viewing response logs, viewing API usage, and API sharing policies.

How Can Appinventiv Help the Enterprises with Cloud Computing?

Be it an enterprise willing to scale or an organization planning to uplift the workforce, they require a team of experts with a deep understanding and technical expertise to take their business to the next level.

Appinventiv is among the fast-growing cloud service companies where each person strives to deliver the best technology solutions. It has a solid clientele base and has brought a job search platform on the cloud resulting in JobGet receiving USD 2.1 million in funding.

Reach out to our experts and discuss your requirements for serverless computing solutions.

Wrapping up!

In a highly disruptive time, a serverless infrastructure gives agility to the business to move quickly. As we move to the digital world, the user experience will stand at the top, and companies keeping up with the expectations will have the edge over others. Organizations benefit from serverless architecture, ranging from reduced costs to more efficiency and less administrative hassles to unlimited capacity.

It is high time for enterprises to stack up the various benefits of serverless computing and switch to this revolutionary tech. More and more businesses will turn to serverless as a critical evolution of cloud computing in the upcoming years — and reap the benefits.

FAQ’s

Q1. What is Serverless Computing?

A: A serverless computing in simple terms means a process of offering backend services on an as-used basis. It enables developers to form applications faster by terminating the need for them to manage underlying infrastructure.