Business benefits of Serverless in practice

Serverless computing has become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason. It offers a number of compelling benefits for businesses looking to build and deploy applications quickly and cost-effectively.

One of the key advantages of serverless is its ability to handle spikes in demand without the need for manual intervention. With serverless, your application can automatically scale up to meet the increased demand, and then scale back down again when traffic subsides. This means you only pay for the resources you actually use, rather than having to maintain a bunch of idle servers just in case.

So how does serverless development play out in practice? Let's take a look at a few common use cases:

Web and Mobile Back Ends

One of the most obvious use cases for serverless is building back ends for web and mobile applications. Imagine you're running an e-commerce site and it's Black Friday. Suddenly, you're hit with a massive surge in traffic as bargain-hungry shoppers flock to your site. With a traditional server-based architecture, you'd need to have enough capacity provisioned in advance to handle this spike, which can be both expensive and inefficient.

With serverless, however, your application can automatically scale up to meet the increased demand, and then scale back down again when traffic subsides. This means you only pay for the resources you actually use, rather than having to maintain a bunch of idle servers just in case.

Data Processing and Analysis

An interesting thing to note about variable demand is that it doesn't always come from "out there". Data processing is one example of where demand can be highly variable, but it's coming from within your own systems rather than from external users.

Consider a scenario where you have a large dataset that needs to be processed on a regular basis, perhaps to generate reports or update machine learning models. The amount of data you need to process might vary significantly from one run to the next, depending on factors like the amount of new data generated or the complexity of the processing required.

With a traditional architecture, you'd need to provision enough server capacity to handle your peak processing needs, which means a lot of that capacity might sit idle much of the time. But with serverless, you can set up your data processing tasks to run on a schedule or in response to specific events, and let the platform dynamically allocate resources as needed. This means you can process data more efficiently and cost-effectively, without over-provisioning or paying for idle resources.

IoT and Event-Driven Architectures

Finally, serverless is also an excellent fit for IoT and event-driven architectures where processing spikes are coming from both internal and external causes. Imagine you're building an IoT system to monitor air quality in a city. You have hundreds or even thousands of sensors deployed across the city, each one constantly measuring pollutant levels and transmitting that data back to your servers.

With a conventional architecture, you'd need to have servers running 24/7 to receive and process this data. But the volume of data coming in is likely to be highly variable - during peak traffic times, you might be receiving readings every few seconds, but in the middle of the night, it could slow to a trickle.

This is where serverless really shines. Instead of running servers constantly, you can set up your system so that every time a sensor sends a reading, it triggers a serverless function to process that piece of data. If a thousand readings come in at once, a thousand functions will spin up in parallel to handle them. But if there's no data coming in, no functions will run, and you won't be paying for any idle server time.

Media Streaming

Another common use case for serverless is media streaming, such as training videos, webinars, or live events. In these scenarios, there is typically a very high demand for a short period, followed by little to no traffic. For example, a company offering online training courses might have thousands of employees watching a training video simultaneously, creating a massive load on the system. Once the training session is over, demand drops significantly until the next session.

With a traditional server-based architecture, the company would need to provision enough capacity to handle these peak loads, resulting in wasted resources and costs when the demand is low. However, with a serverless architecture, the video streaming system can automatically scale up to meet high demand during the training session and scale back down to zero afterward. This means the company only pays for the actual compute time used, rather than maintaining always-on servers.

Additionally, serverless platforms typically offer high bandwidth and can manage large numbers of concurrent connections, which is ideal for video streaming. Many serverless platforms also have built-in media services that simplify the process of transcoding and delivering video content. For businesses delivering training, webinars, live events, or other video content to large audiences, serverless provides a scalable, cost-effective solution that is easy to implement and manage.

2 key principles of Serverless

So, what does all this mean for businesses? In short, serverless development can offer a number of compelling benefits but all of those can be reduced to two clear principles that give the following advantages:

1. Reliability: Your website, app or system won't crash from peaks of demand.
2. Better value: You'll pay less money for using fewer resources.

Are we making it too simple? Well, it’s true that there’s a lot more to serverless than meets the eye and we’d be the first to say that it’s not a silver bullet to all your problems either. Indeed, there are some use cases where a more traditional architecture might make sense but the use cases we’ve described above show that serverless is a compelling mix of cost savings, agility, and scalability that's hard to beat. We hope you want to find out more!

Further Reading

• Getting Started with Serverless: This article provides an overview of serverless computing on AWS, discussing the basics, benefits, and how to get started. It's a great resource for those new to the concept, explaining the fundamental aspects of serverless architectures.
• 5 Benefits of Building Serverless Applications: This piece outlines the key advantages of adopting serverless applications, such as faster time-to-market, cost efficiency, and easier scalability.
• 4 Quick Tips for Serverless Developers: This article provides essential tips for developers working with serverless architectures, helping them streamline their processes and avoid common pitfalls.