What is serverless computing? How can cloud servicing companies enable organizations to adopt it?

Organizations are often deprived of time and resources to concentrate on their core business areas as they must delve into mundane tasks of managing IT resources and infrastructure. Serverless Computing relieves both software development and IT management teams from worrying about IT resource management and instead focusing on their core business areas. 

Today Serverless Computing has garnered huge popularity and according to the Mordor Intelligence report, the Serverless Computing Market is expected to register a healthy CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of over 23.17% during the forecast period (2021 - 2026). 

Serverless Computing: An Overview  

Serverless Computing is a method of providing back-end service where the service provider manages the underlying server, and the server vendor must pay based on the usage and not based on the number of servers. 

While defining Serverless Computing the term ‘serverless’ should not be treated literally. Serverless Computing will not eliminate the physical servers from the picture. Instead, the physical servers will be managed by cloud service providers and the computer, storage and resources will be available on a pay-per-usage basis.

Nuts and Bolts of Serverless Computing

Before embracing serverless computing the computational world has gone through Bare Metal/Physical Server, Virtualization, Containerization based software development methods and today serverless computing is also known as serverless architecture and here are its important components:  

• Software Containers: They help users to reap the benefits of microservices and containerization without the complexity of managing them. The software containers bring the power of serverless technology to the users by functioning as a virtual repository for serverless code.  
• The Backend as a Service (BaaS): BaaS helps users to run serverless code in software containers by acting as an intermediary between the user and code implementation in the Software Containers. 

Amazon Lambda is the best example of BaaS. It helps developers by automating the entire back- end development process in the form of managed service. It also provides guidelines for developers on developing and submitting the code. 

• Serverless databases: Developers looking for persistent data storage face difficulty in storing data permanently with serverless computing as it is event-driven and lacks a persistent state. This limitation is addressed by employing Serverless databases like Amazon DynamoDB. MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra. In simple words serverless databases help users to permanently store data in the serverless environment. 
• Serverless Framework: An open-source framework that helps developers to create, compile, package code for serverless implementation with ease and deploy in the cloud. Also, it significantly reduces the configuration time. The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) and Serverless are popular serverless frameworks.

Why do Organizations Need Serverless Computing?

Serverless Computing has witnessed a wide adoption rate in the past 3-4 years with 50% of organizations relying on it to enhance productivity. Two important reasons for organizations adopting serverless computing are:

• It minimizes operational costs as organizations need not have to invest in racks of servers and rack space to maintain them.
• Organizations can scale up the server capacity based on the spike in demands and need not unnecessarily invest in additional IT infrastructure.  

How Cloud Consulting Companies Power-Up Organizations with Serverless Computing?

Cloud Consulting pioneers help organizations to adopt Serverless Computing and enjoy simplified operations, a reduced IT budget, enhanced productivity, and effortless efficiency. 

For instance, consulting organizations offer serverless consulting and advisory to understand the client’s needs and assist in designing a strategy to achieve organizational goals. Moreover, the serverless-first strategy is employed at all three layers of the stack: compute, integration, and data stores. Here are some of the important serverless services used to realize serverless-first applications.

• AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate serverless services are employed to implement serverless computing at the compute layer of stack.
• Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppSync serverless services are used at application integration layer.
• Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS Proxy, Amazon Aurora Serverless are employed at the datastores layer of stack.

Consulting organizations also employ Serverless Azure (Microsoft), Google Functions, IBM/Apache’s Open Whisk, and Oracle Cloud to implement the serverless architecture. In addition, they also offer ‘Function-as-a-service’ (FaaS) and Backend as a service (BaaS). 

To summarize, leveraging the services of Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Functions helps organizations to run their applications without managing or provisioning the server. It helps the developers to focus on application logic rather than worrying about the number of instances to manage or what kind of services are operational. Moreover, it allows developers to scale out instances to meet the changing needs of organizations. 

The article has been written by Bhavesh Goswami, Founder and CEO, CloudThat