How Serverless Architecture Reduces Costs and Increases Agility
Serverless architecture has emerged as a game-changer in the realm of cloud computing. It has revolutionized the way developers build and deploy applications. With serverless architecture, business owners can transform application development into a true competitive advantage.
Serverless architecture offers enormous benefits over traditional server-based architecture. It is the reason why most organizations are adopting the new technology over the traditional one.
Out of all, the two most intriguing benefits of serverless architecture are that it significantly reduces cost and increases agility. But how does this happen?
That’s what we are going to explore in this post. We will take a deep dive into the world of serverless architecture to find out how it benefits cost and agility for a business. Also, we will take a look at some use cases in the real world.
What is Serverless Architecture?
Serverless architecture is a cloud-based computing model that eliminates infrastructure management and provisioning tasks, allowing developers to focus solely on writing code for individual functions or services. In a serverless architecture, you leverage various fully managed services that take care of various backend concerns. A cloud service provider offers these services.
By using these fully managed services, developers don’t have to worry about managing and scaling server infrastructure. Serverless architecture operates on the principle of Functions as a Service (FaaS) and has an event-driven nature. FaaS enables developers to write and deploy codes in the form of functions. These functions are then triggered by specific events or requests.
How Serverless Architecture Reduces Cost
Serverless architecture offers several cost advantages that directly result in reducing development costs for businesses. According to a report by S&P Global Market Intelligence, businesses have reported a significant reduction in their annual cost by 35% after leveraging serverless architecture.
So, how exactly does serverless architecture achieve such a substantial reduction in costs? Let’s have a look at some prominent reasons.
Pay-as-you-go Model
A prominent cost advantage of serverless architecture is the pay-as-you-go model. In this model, you have to pay only for the compute time you use. You are billed by the service provider according to the total number of code execution and the overall duration of the execution. With this micro-billing model, businesses significantly save costs, especially for applications with irregular traffic and unpredictable workloads.
No Infrastructure Management
With serverless architecture, you are not required to manage server infrastructure on your own. The cloud service provider takes complete responsibility for maintaining servers, addressing security problems, and performing updates. It means that you do not require dedicated teams and other resources to manage servers. This leads to reducing operational costs and freeing up resources for more strategic initiatives.
Automatic Scalability
Serverless architecture has the capability to automatically scale up or down based on demand. This eliminates the overprovisioning of resources to handle peak traffic, reducing costs associated with unused capacity. Also, businesses don’t have to invest time, resources, and manpower in manual resource planning and allocation, further contributing to cost savings.
Reduced Development Expenditures
Serverless environments often come with built-in integrations for databases, authentication, and other services, allowing developers to quickly build and deploy applications. Faster development cycles translate to reduced labor costs and a lesser need for resources. According to the previously mentioned report, businesses experienced a notable reduction of 19% in development expenditures only.
How Serverless Architecture Increases Agility
Apart from reducing costs, serverless architecture also contributes to increasing the agility of businesses. Market insights reveal that the global serverless market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 33.5% from 2024 to 2030. This growth indicates that businesses understand the importance of leveraging serverless architecture to get agile responses to market demands.
Let’s learn more about some reasons behind how serverless architecture increases agility;
Faster Time to Market
Serverless architecture improves the Time to Market (TTM) which enables the developers to release new features quickly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The entire process of continuous integration and delivery is streamlined in serverless architecture, allowing rapid innovation and updates. The code delivery process is also automated in a serverless system.
Focus on Core Business Logic
Offloading infrastructure concerns to the cloud service provider enables development teams to focus on core business logic, improve user experience, and create value for their business. This allows development teams to efficiently use resources on development tasks rather than on maintaining servers. This ensures faster development of new features and better user experience.
Event-driven Flexibility
The functions in a serverless architecture are event-driven. It means that these functions can respond in real time to various triggers such as API requests, database updates, or file uploads. This flexibility enables developers to build highly responsive applications tailored to user-specific needs. Also, developers can make quick changes in specific parts of the application based on user feedback.
Global Reach
Serverless platforms are often globally available, distributing applications to data centers all across the globe. This feature enables applications to serve users with low latency regardless of their location. This contributes to enhancing the user experience and ensures smooth global operations with minimal effort. The overall benefits of all these effects go to increasing the agility of businesses.
Real-world Use Cases
Serverless architecture has various use cases in the real-world scenario. Here are a few of them:
E-commerce Applications- E-commerce companies use serverless architecture to handle fluctuating traffic during high-demand events like flash sales. With serverless, the cloud service provider can automatically scale resources based on demand. This avoids over-provisioning or under-provisioning of resources, thus optimizing cost.
IoT Applications- With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, serverless architecture provides an ideal solution for handling real-time data processing and device integration in these devices. Events triggered by the device evoke serverless functions enabling applications to process and react to data in real-time.
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants- Serverless architecture is empowering chatbot and virtual assistant technologies by allowing real-time data processing. Event-driven functions of serverless architecture allow chatbots and virtual assistants to analyze data as it arrives and quickly create accurate responses to the queries made.
Conclusion
Serverless architecture offers numerous benefits that contribute to reducing costs and increasing agility. By eliminating the hassle of infrastructure management, providing automatic scalability, and enabling rapid development cycles, the serverless architecture enables businesses to focus more on what matters the most– innovation.
Serverless architecture shines as a new way of deploying applications in the cloud. With its even-driven functions, automatic scalability, and fully managed services, serverless architecture can lead to significant cost savings as well as increasing agility to deliver your customers with superior user experience.
