SERVERLESS
One Small Step for DevOps, One Giant Leap for Continuous Deployment
“We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in Legacy Platforms, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of Dev and Ops cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our foremost objective -- a new Continuous Delivery Model -- can emerge: a new simplified architecture style, freer from the threat of having to provision or manage servers, stronger in the pursuit of decomposition, and more secure in the quest for Immutable Infrastructures.”
A little play on George H. W. Bush’s 1990 speech on the Persian Gulf Crisis
The Reasons for Taking the Leap are Clear
You’re likely aware that serverless computing is the next big thing in the cloud paradigm. Let’s begin by saying that the word serverless does not represent the actual state of the technology. There’s still a server somewhere - you just don’t need to buy, manage, or maintain it anymore. You get to reduce cost, increase productivity and leave all the “dirty work” to someone else!
You’ll Save Time
No more provisioning, managing, or thinking about how your application will scale up or down. Not only won’t you need to deal with implementation upon deployment, but all the time you spend dealing with the infrastructure afterwards will again be yours to spend on further innovation.
You can Save Money
In a serverless world where you pay-per-trigger, you don’t need to write on/off scripts, plan reservations, or plan for spikes. You just pay for what you use.
Empowering Dev is the Only Choice
Serverless has become a movement about developer empowerment. What serverless really means is that, as a developer, you can quickly build apps that handle production-ready traffic. Serverless takes away the most monotonous parts of building an application, leaving you free to actually spend your days coding. You don’t have to actively manage scaling for your applications. You don't have to provision servers. You don’t have to pay for resources that go unused. You just focus on your business logic, not your servers.
Driving Real Dev Benefits
- Zero administration - Deploy code without provisioning anything beforehand, or managing anything afterward. No more bothering the Ops department.
- Auto-scaling - It’s your service providers who manage the scaling challenges. No need to fire alerts or write scripts to scale up and down.
- Pay-per-use - Function-as-a-service compute and managed services charged based on usage rather than pre-provisioned capacity. Complete resource utilization without paying a cent for idle time. 90% cost-savings over cloud VM, and you never pay for resources you don’t use.
- Increased velocity - Shorten the loop between having an idea and deploying to production. Less to provision up front and less to manage after deployment, so smaller teams can ship more features.
Is Serverless the Realization of Tech Utopia?
If thousands of developers are already proving that serverless can enable them to launch applications at record speed and cost, then who’s to argue? No denying that serverless brings a lot of benefits to the table, but there’s no single approach, technology or strategy that’s a silver-bullet - it’s all based on your context. Ultimately, serverless is about focusing your efforts on what provides value to your users. Shipping product faster provides value to your users. You decide.
