Cloud-Native App Development: Containers and Serverless Computing

At a time when business leaders are trying to create more value with fewer resources, containers and serverless computing enable organizations to reduce IT overhead, improve deployment speed, streamline app development, and more. However, taking advantage of these technologies requires much more than simple “lift-and-shift” migrations.

To achieve maximum performance, your applications must be built for the cloud. Otherwise, you risk leaving tremendous growth and cost-savings opportunities on the table. One of our Solutions Architects led a webinar recently discussing containers and serverless computing. In this post, we highlight Ed’s biggest takeaways for launching modern cloud applications with containers and serverless computing.

Cloud Adoption Growing Rapidly

More and more, organizations realize the benefits of moving away from on-premises systems to cloud-based architecture. As a result, cloud adoption has accelerated significantly in recent years. In 2020 alone, cloud computing is expected to grow by nearly 20%.

Compared to on-premises systems, the cloud is more reliable, secure, and flexible. Businesses can easily leverage sophisticated capabilities, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), offer numerous features that developers can quickly implement at scale without having to invest in the underlying infrastructure.

Organizations can trust the cloud with their critical business information, customer data, and core applications. The cloud is also highly durable and available, enabling companies to keep their services up and running.

Additionally, companies on the cloud are more agile. They don’t have to wait for physical hardware, funding approvals, shipments, or installations to make critical updates. IT teams don’t have to provision resources themselves, and developers can experiment freely without putting the rest of the enterprise at risk. By utilizing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities, leaders can free up tech resources to focus on other areas that drive business value.

Overall, companies that use the cloud effectively can do more with less, keep applications running, retain customers longer, deliver services faster, and scale with demand.

Getting the Most out of Cloud Computing

Business leaders are beginning to recognize the limitations of using legacy, monolithic applications. However, many aren’t sure of the best way to transition from on-premises systems to the cloud.

We see a lot of organizations execute rehosting projects (“lift-and-shift” migrations) that don’t involve any changes to existing architecture. Some replatform, while others buy something entirely new.

In our view, the ultimate goal should be to have cloud-native applications, which often require refactoring. Through refactoring, companies can re-design applications for elasticity and exchange monoliths for microservices. More specifically, organizations can begin using containers and serverless computing, both of which are incredibly valuable.

What are Containers?

Containers are portable, lightweight, and standardized units of software that contain entire runtime environments. They allow users to develop apps more quickly, deploy across multiple operating systems, achieve greater efficiency, and maintain consistency across all environments.

Our team worked closely with FinTech company SavvyMoney to containerize applications and enhance the overall functionality of the core SaaS platform. After implementing containers with a handful of AWS services, such as Elastic Container Service, Amazon Kinesis, and AWS SSM Parameter Store, SavvyMoney was able to reduce IT management costs, cut overhead, increase application reliability, and speed up release deployments.

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing allows companies to allocate resources dynamically to run code based on event triggers. The serverless model is exploding right now at an annual growth rate of 75% due to its many benefits.

Organizations only have to pay for code that is executed, and developers don’t have to worry about managing servers at all. Serverless computing is also inherently scalable and supports rapid deployments.

Our team recently helped The Salvation Army design and launch a new donation application. The solution relied on serverless computing and AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, API Gateway, S3, and Lambda, to scale to millions of donors while keeping costs down.

Learn More about Containers and Serverless Computing

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, ClearScale is uniquely positioned to support organizations through their cloud journeys. Not only do we have extensive experience with cloud application development services, but we also have access to funding opportunities that help companies cover the costs of optimizing IT infrastructure on the AWS platform.

We implement containers and serverless computing in conjunction with many AWS features, including:

• AWS Fargate
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Event Bridge
• Amazon SNS
• Amazon API Gateway

To learn more about how these AWS services enable business transformation through modern app development and deployment, watch our webinar.

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