5 Business Benefits of Serverless

This blog was written by CSA’s Serverless Working Group.

Serverless computing offers several business benefits over traditional cloud-based or server-centric infrastructure. Consider a cloud-native serverless architecture for your organization if you’re hoping to improve in any of the following areas of computing:

Innovation

One of the aspects organization leaders are pursuing is the speed of innovation that serverless and cloud platforms bring to their existing products and services.

For example, an organization can rearrange different business units for efficient, reusable, and innovative outcomes. Serverless is a way an organization can achieve modularity, cost reduction, and reduced complexity of creating, scaling, and managing cloud infrastructures. It helps developers deploy applications rapidly, accelerating the time-to-market of new products and introducing features (including security). It’s a new way of application design that organizations should use to increase competitiveness.

Agility

An aspect of serverless is that it enables a modular organization, making it easier for organizations to adapt to market events and respond to unforeseen circumstances.

Today, organizations fueled by the post-pandemic digitization are investing in key areas that would allow them to become more competitive through technology to achieve business objectives. One key aspect is using serverless to modernize the digitization of business processes. Since they foster activities such as DevOps and cross team collaboration, it enables the organization to break silos and drive transformation throughout the organization.

CapEx/OpEx

One key aspect of cloud computing and transformation was the shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure. Serverless provides further cost saving benefits by removing the traditional costs for running containers and managing containerized infrastructure.

The nature of sub second billing of serverless, coupled with event-driven architectures, allows organizations to optimize spending as a function of scalability - only requiring execution on demand and paying for operations that are necessary only when they run (or “Pay as you go/ pay per transaction”).

Speed to Market

By utilizing fully managed serverless services, enhanced security and faster development are both possible, allowing for faster development and deployment cycles, therefore enabling Cloud Service Customers (CSCs) to benefit from accelerated “Speed to Market." Serverless computing increases scalability, agility, and speed of delivery in a few different ways:

1. Underlying infrastructure is invisible. The underlying infrastructure is abstracted and therefore invisible to the end user since it is managed by the cloud service provider (CSP).
2. Fewer and shorter downtimes. There are shorter and fewer downtimes because the CSP can isolate failures due to improved availability and redundancy across multiple zones.
3. Faster releases. The microservices architecture and DevOps pipeline enable consumers to deliver releases faster.
4. Cost reductions. The total cost of development, maintenance, and infrastructure is shared between both CSP and CSC, with CSC ending up with significant cost savings when compared to the cost if they were solely responsible.

Automation

For several years now, among successful enterprises, it has been a common understanding that automation and orchestration are key tools in improving cost effectiveness, speed to market, and security. Serverless computing services are one such tool that can help organizations achieve both operational and security benefits by automating certain workloads. This is especially true when serverless computing tools are used in conjunction with other automation tools.

To learn more about serverless architectures, along with their risks and security concerns, check out the publication C-Level Guidance to Securing Serverless Architectures.