How Serverless Computing Unlocks Business Agility

Agility is essential in today’s ever-evolving world. Industries, business models, and consumer demands are changing all the time, making it hard for slow-moving organizations to compete. It’s agile corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies that can handle the ups and downs of the modern marketplace and capitalize on new opportunities.

But what is it that makes a business agile? How do leaders improve agility?

In the age of digital transformation, there are several paths organizations can take. But one of the best approaches is to move away from managing servers in-house and outsourcing that work to a public cloud provider, i.e., adopting serverless computing.

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless is a cloud computing technology capable of running code, managing data, and integrating applications – all without administering servers. Serverless technologies feature automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-use billing model to increase agility and optimize costs.

Despite how it sounds, serverless computing doesn’t mean that there are no servers. It just means that developers don’t have to worry about provisioning servers or managing infrastructure scaling. One of the reasons that IT teams go this route is that managing servers is a lot of work. Administrative tasks, like capacity provisioning and patching, can be unwieldy, especially for smaller organizations trying to deploy modern applications.

Managing servers is also inefficient from a cost perspective, as organizations often have to purchase compute power for peak demand scenarios. With standard IaaS models, organizations often pay for “always-on” server components to run applications. With serverless computing, the organization stops paying once the code finishes executing. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an app, rather than on pre-purchased capacity.

Serverless computing can also reduce costs for applications that are used inconsistently, as peak periods alternate with times of little to no traffic. Paying for continuously running, always available servers that aren’t continually in use is wasteful and expensive. A serverless setup responds instantly when needed and does not incur costs while at rest.

The answer to these problems is to go serverless. Serverless computing is the technology that forward-thinking teams use to increase agility and accelerate application development, without having to hire new tech talent or invest enormous sums of money in new IT resources. Going serverless is more a matter of implementing purpose-built services, practices, and strategies that enable organizations to access the compute resources they need with minimal effort.

Why is Serverless Computing Useful?

Serverless computing offers several advantages. First, as mentioned above, serverless computing frees IT teams from managing, provisioning, and configuring servers to support their applications. They can offload that administrative effort to a public cloud provider. Then, they can spend more time building compelling applications that create value.

Serverless computing also typically reduces IT costs, as enterprises only pay for resources that they consume. They don’t have to pre-purchase compute power for peak demand. Instead, they can buy what they need when they need it.

Another advantage – applications built with a serverless infrastructure scale automatically. If a function must be run in multiple instances, the servers start up, run, and stop as needed. There’s no need to upload code to servers or perform a complex backend configuration in order to release a working version of an app.

Additionally, serverless computing facilitates performance improvements in other areas, as it’s often used to support next-gen cloud solutions and technologies. For instance, it’s common to see data lakes, data streaming infrastructure, cloud-native databases, and advanced analytics capabilities built on top of serverless architecture.

The question is, “which cloud services provider is the best one to gain access to these capabilities?”

Why AWS is the Best Platform for Going Serverless

Serverless computing is available through several public cloud platforms. However, one cloud services provider stands above the rest: Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS owns an extensive suite of serverless computing solutions designed to make it easier for organizations to take full advantage of the technology. For instance, AWS offers services like Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, and AWS Step Functions that make it easier to leverage serverless computing in different capacities.

Through AWS’ many serverless solutions, organizations can:

• Store data in secure, flexible environments
• Optimize resource utilization
• Iterate quickly and shorten go-to-market cycles
• Ingest, process, and analyze data with advanced machine learning models
• And much more

Click here to see a full list of serverless solutions from AWS. With these services, organizations can increase business agility significantly while also simplifying backend IT administration.

Implement Serverless Computing With ClearScale

Organizations less familiar with serverless architecture might prefer to work with a cloud consultancy that understands how to leverage the technology successfully on AWS. This is where ClearScale comes in. ClearScale has implemented serverless architecture for many types of organizations, including for-profit corporations and nonprofits.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ClearScale worked closely with the medical consulting firm Creative Practice Solutions (CPS) to build a secure remote appointment application that physicians could use to conduct telemedicine visits with patients. Serverless architecture was foundational to the final solution – ClearScale used Amazon Connect, a serverless contact center, AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for managing containers, and AWS Lambda to get the remote appointment application online.

ClearScale has also implemented serverless solutions in the nonprofit space for one of the most well-known charitable organizations in the world: The Salvation Army. ClearScale engineers built The Salvation Army a serverless donation processing solution for collecting cashless gifts and also implemented a serverless data analytics solution using Amazon Aurora Serverless.

In both of these case studies, ClearScale put clients in a position to reduce costs, accelerate innovation, and increase business agility. Plus, in-house engineers no longer have to worry about whether they have enough compute capacity available. They simply purchase it from AWS when the need arises.

Ready to learn more? Get a free serverless assessment from ClearScale. You’ll gain an understanding of design principles for serverless applications according to seven key areas to consider when building a serverless workload.

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