Serverless Computing Delivers the Next Level of Business Efficiency
Efficiency has always been and always will be a mainstay at the top of the priority list for businesses. While the methods to achieving efficiency have evolved over the years, the end goal has always remained the same: do more with less.
Over the last few years, the journey to efficiency largely focused on cloud migration. While this move is certainly a step in the right direction, it does not comprise the whole journey. To achieve true business efficiency, it’s not enough to be in the cloud—you must also embrace cloud-native architectures.
Moving Beyond Lift-and-Shift
According to the analyst firm Gartner, “Today’s cloud migration strategies tend more toward ‘lift-and-shift’ than toward modernization or refactoring.” It’s easy to understand why this is the case—the lift-and-shift method offers the fastest and most cost-effective path to the cloud. But herein lies the problem: with this migration method, IT teams are essentially virtualizing existing on-premises infrastructure, rather than architecting for the cloud.
So, while organizations often expect that a cloud migration of this nature will instantly deliver greater efficiency, the truth is that many aren’t able to fully realize this benefit— because, despite operating in a new hyperscale cloud environment, IT continues to be mired in legacy technology, approaches and processes.
Cloud-native architectures eliminate the burden of legacy technology and processes, and represent the next level of business efficiency. To demonstrate why, let’s take a look at serverless computing, which is one of the best examples of a cloud-native architecture—one that enables a more agile, responsive and efficient business.
What Is Serverless Computing?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) does a great job of explaining in simple terms what serverless computing is all about: “Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers.” With this cloud-native architecture, servers—and the associated burdens of managing and maintaining them—no longer exist. Your cloud service provider or CSP (e.g., AWS or Microsoft Azure) becomes your operating system, and you deploy and run your code and applications on top of the CSP platform—without having to worry about provisioning or managing the underlying servers.
Until recently, serverless computing was mostly of interest to developers building greenfield applications. This is because:
- Serverless computing provides very low initial running costs
- It provides rapid scale out without having to re-architect
- Costs increase and decrease linearly with utilization
Recently, however, the use cases for serverless have expanded beyond greenfield application deployments. Many organizations are realizing that refactoring core legacy applications, websites and systems—whether housed on-premises or in the cloud—to a serverless architecture can empower them to shed legacy infrastructure and the accompanying technical debt, fully realize cloud-native benefits, and achieve the next level of business efficiency. For an example use case, check out this article from The Register, which details how the BBC website moved its entire web estate to a serverless platform on AWS.
The Big Benefits of Going Serverless
Beyond the benefits of shedding legacy infrastructure and technical debt, and achieving greater efficiency, here are some additional advantages of the serverless computing architecture that can drastically transform your business.
- You are freed from the burden of infrastructure management. With serverless computing, you are essentially offloading the burden of infrastructure management to your CSP, and this means no more worrying about support, management and maintenance of on-premises infrastructure or virtual machines. This enables you to free your IT team to focus on other priorities, like developing new applications that will better serve the business. Perhaps most importantly, because your team is no longer bogged down with keep-the-lights on management tasks, they have the opportunity to become business domain experts who are always on the lookout for ways to improve efficiency, cut costs and help the company grow.
- You can auto-scale on demand. In a serverless architecture, your CSP is responsible for dynamically managing the allocation of resources required to run your application. In other words, you no longer have to think about adding more servers to meet peak demand, or about the money you’re wasting by paying for servers that you aren’t using. The CSP handles all of this for you by automatically scaling services based on your current demand.
- Your costs are based on actual usage. Rather than dealing with a monthly subscription model, with serverless computing, costs are aligned with actual usage. So, you no longer have to pay when functions aren’t running; you’re only paying when code is executed. For example, to support a website, you are no longer tied to a monthly fee for a piece of infrastructure sized to meet your peak demand. Instead, you only pay for resources allocated when visitors show up on your site.
- You can accelerate the pace of change and increase agility. Updating an application running on tradition infrastructure is no simple task. For starters, you have to load the servers, deal with back-end configurations, upload new code and manage load balancing—not to mention you’re tied to the lengthy deployment and testing cycles that accompany traditional infrastructure. When you remove servers from the equation, however, you can bypass all of this pre-work and deploy your innovations straight to the application. This allows you to accelerate the pace of change within applications and immediately take advantage of market opportunities, increasing your agility and responsiveness to deliver value across the business.
Your Cloud-Native Journey Starts Now
In 2021, organizations will embark on the next evolution in business efficiency—cloud-native architectures, and serverless computing will be a major part of the journey. To learn more about how Navisite can help you refactor for the cloud, modernize your IT environments and achieve maximum business efficiency, contact us today.