Serverless computing is on a steep upward trend of adoption with the majority of enterprises adopting it with the aim of lowering costs while increasing efficiency.
Here at Ballard Chalmers, our journey to cloud-only started a while ago. However, on 11 May 2020, we completed the process and achieved our goal of being 100% cloud-only.
Today, our offices now have no servers at all. We even ditched our phone system and moved to VOIP (Voice-over IP) with Microsoft Teams. Not only has being cloud-only served us very well during the COVID 19 pandemic and 100% working from home, but it has also brought many other benefits to our client service.
If you’re considering serverless computing, here’s how it can benefit your business.
Overview
Serverless computing could be considered an erroneous term, as it doesn’t actually mean no servers at all. The servers are still there but their provisioning and maintenance are managed by whichever cloud provider you decide to go with.
The main serverless vendors are Microsoft with Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud.
Sometimes referred to as serverless architecture, it is gaining popularity more rapidly than was anticipated only two years ago. One of the reasons for this is the onerous task of ensuring the hardware is running smoothly is the responsibility of the cloud provider. To all intents and purposes, your developers need hardly be aware that the server even exists.
Today, in a dramatically-changed world of work, where remote working is actively encouraged by the government, serverless computing is truly coming into its own.
Benefits of Serverless Computing
Real-time Scalability
We consider this to be a huge benefit because of the ability to scale up or down in an instant, depending on the needs of your business. It’s quick and attractive in money-saving terms.
In other words, with serverless computing, there’s no need to provision infrastructure according to the possible demands of your future business. If your app takes off you can simply scale up.
Equally, if the demand decreases, it’s easy to scale back down. There are no physical servers that need to be kept running not at full capacity or with wasted processing power and unused disk space.
Lower Costs
Another benefit usually associated with serverless computing is lower costs. Every business is concerned with how to save money while still delivering the best service or product.
In simple terms, going serverless means you only pay for the resources you use. Also, you’re outsourcing the maintenance of your servers to a cloud provider. Managing and patching a host, and the maintenance of physical hardware and containers, therefore, suddenly becomes a thing of the past.
As does the hours of staff time, not to mention stress, that is part and parcel of traditional physical servers. You’ll no longer need to worry about a network glitch or system overload that previously may have taken down your server.
As a result, your developers can focus fully on writing the code that deals with business logic.
Increase Your Speed to Market
Provisioning an IT infrastructure using traditional physical servers, takes days at the very least. More often, it runs into weeks costing time and money due to the need for development, testing and then delivery of the functionality.
Serverless architecture, however, which is capable of running multiple versions of code is able to meet tight deadlines. You can, therefore, turn your business ideation into a reality in just a few hours, sometimes even minutes.
Improved Network Latency
Network latency refers to the time it takes for a request to travel from the sender to the receiver including processing the request. Obviously, this impacts customer experience; something we all strive to improve.
In traditional systems, there are many causes of delays prior to the transfer of data, but going serverless helps enhance network latency. Because there is no longer an origin server, the request can take a much shorter route close to the end-user.
Final Thoughts
You only need to look at the last decade to see how far cloud computing has come and, more importantly, how far it could go.
The onset of Covid-19 has sped up the process greatly, and serverless computing will continue to make significant progress in market share for managed services.
Cloud computing continues to evolve, as it has done since its beginning. As more businesses now move to serverless, it seems inevitable that it will at some point be able to tackle almost anything businesses demand of it.
Is your business considering migrating to the cloud? If so, we can help. We’re a Microsoft Gold Partner in the Cloud Platform (and other specialisations) and a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) with many years of experience helping businesses like yours migrate to the cloud.
Contact us on 01342 410223 or click here and fill out a short form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
