Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore serverless computing and how it can impact business operations.
The introduction of cloud computing in the late 2000s changed organizations’ understanding about IT infrastructure. Serverless computing, the next generation of cloud computing, is taking IT operations to a whole new level. However, don’t let the term “serverless” confuse you—a server is still needed for computational operations. The only difference in serverless computing is that an organization doesn’t need to have a physical server for running its code, and can instead outsource its code execution operations to a cloud provider.
Application developers may love writing code, but provisioning, configuring, and managing the server that the code runs on may not be what they signed up for. Serverless computing is here to relieve them of the tension of server operation and maintenance, and give them more time to focus on the actual code. And it’s not just about the developer, either—organizations won’t need to cram their offices with more servers or hire more employees to manage these servers.
Another upside of serverless computing is that it uses auto-scaling, meaning vendors charge organizations based on their computations. Thus, organizations only pay for what they require. With that said, here are five interesting reads on even more ways serverless computing can provide organizations the upper hand in business operations.
1. What is serverless computing and why should you care?
Before serverless computing, cloud-hosted services needed hardware which had to be provisioned, configured, and paired with the rest of the infrastructure to run applications. Now there’s a better way forward with serverless computing, which lets developers write and deploy code without the hassle of managing the underlying infrastructure.
2. Is Serverless Architecture Right For Your Organization?
With benefits like reduced time to market, superior scalability and latency, and geo-location factors, serverless computing will help organizations reduce cost and complexity.
3. Serverless computing could unleash a new startup ecosystem
While serverless computing simplifies business operations on one side, it creates a whole new set of requirements on the other. It brings forth an opportunity to create a new set of tools that will help developers monitor and debug applications, the two main challenges that might arise with the onset of serverless computing.
4. Advantages of Serverless Computing
Serverless architecture is a creative way of deploying and composing an application that empowers engineers to concentrate on code. It benefits organizations in many ways, but most importantly it can result in improved developer productivity, better scalability, and lower costs.
5. The What, Why and How of On-Premises Serverless Computing
Serverless computing is a promising architecture for saving time and money when deploying applications, but companies shouldn’t limit themselves to thinking about serverless just in the cloud. On-premises platforms also have a great deal of potential when it comes to serverless computing depending on the company, industry, and workload.
While cloud computing has brought tremendous change to the way organizations work, serverless computing promises even more. It’s here to revolutionize IT operations, as it will make the long-standing constraints of application development and deployment disappear.
