Organizations around the world spend huge amounts of time and money in innovating technologies and improving application performance. Time may fly but technology is here to stay and managing applications is definitely a task. That’s when serverless computing comes into play to solve such tasks. It is one of the highly effective approaches associated with DevOps that reigns as one of the top trends of DevOps in 2020.

Serverless computing works without having to manage physical servers or provisioning. Due to request processing between servers and client machines, System architectures with servers functioning becomes a chaotic process. Now we can resolve this with serveless computing as it involves cloud providers that handle resources enhancement and maintain flexibility with automation. Further, it aids the organization by having to pay for necessary provisioning only when it is required and eliminates the need to pay for idle resources.

Serverless computing with DevOps

Serverless computing simplifies the operations of DevOps and improves scalability of the architecture with predictable costing. DevOps empathizes on automatic software development cycle comprising build, test, deployment, upgrades and monitoring through CI/CD pipeline and team collaboration. Now, serverless computing helps in reducing the work of developers as it takes care of the server maintenance like system updates and cloud monitoring.

It brings huge benefits to DevOps by offering operability as it combines Dev and Ops team erasing their divergence. They are closely knitted with cloud servers that restrict access to infrastructure execution from developers’ end. Without a host, serverless computing creates code to implement build, test and deploy DevOps pipelines. This brings in infrastructure and business strategy under one roof in a common repository enabling simple deployments and easy cutbacks.

The key benefits of incorporating serverless computing is that

  • It reduces the configuration time for developers and helps them to focus more on building applications. It takes care of scaling, provisioning, clustering and monitoring
  • We can perform load test in an application before it is rolled out into production with auto-scaled resources in serverless computing
  • It eliminates the need for complex application stacks set up. Stacks like Lambda and Azure that create robust environment set up with the ability to run complex applications at scale
  • It reduces the infrastructure expenditure as physical servers are expensive and costs more due to breakdown vulnerability
  • It allows us to shift from traditional workflows to engage in event based computing to free up time and storage space alongside cost reduction
  • It enables sustainability with Go-green computing as it eliminates the over-use of electricity and physical servers
  • By saving time and money, organizations can now invest their minds on bringing new offerings and deals into the market to stay ahead of the curve.

Though serverless helps in development and testing in the software cycle, it has few drawbacks like

  • It is expensive to deploy applications. The configuration becomes expensive when we want to run the application
  • It affects the speed of application deployment as it takes a while to start running initially. Irrespective of the load size, it requires a lot of ‘cold starts’ that affects the deployment time

An estimation from a survey predicted, 20% of organizations in the world to go serverless this year to improve functionality, accuracy and increase delivery rate impacting the growth of future technology. The next few years will bring about outstanding developments and mutation in the field of serverless computing. Here are the next big things to look out for in serverless computing:

  • Kubernetes will become the foundation of serveless computing
  • Function as a service will grow on a wider scale with serverless infrastructure
  • GitOps in Faas will have more takers as the DevOps system with version control.
  • It will benefit the stateful applications

Serverless infrastructure makes computing robust, powerful and dynamic. Hence, organizations across the globe are starting to leverage serverless computing for high potential developments and massive benefits.

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