5 benefits of serverless architectures

The actual meaning of serverless is «without server». But don’t immediately believe everything you hear. The reality is that in this emerging model increasingly adopted by companies, servers do not disappear. What disappears is the fact of worrying about its management, maintenance, software administration, operating systems and purchase.

In fact, there is no need to think about any infrastructure layer either, not even containers. In a serverless framework, a cloud provider takes care of all that, while the organization only worries about creating the applications it needs to power its business and running them under the lowest cost of ownership.

This is ideal for organizations that need to upgrade from monolithic systems to cloud-native models, or for applications with unpredictable workloads -due to their enormous elasticity-, among many other alternatives.

The use of serverless architectures provides many benefits. Among them, the following five stand out:

1. Unlimited (and guaranteed) scalability. While this is a characteristic associated with any cloud solution, here it becomes even more visible: no matter how many requests the application has to process, it can be hundreds, thousands or millions. It can be hundreds, thousands or millions. The application scales automatically and maintains a perfect balance of resources without any human intervention. This means that responsiveness, non-degradation of the solution and overall performance will always be guaranteed, since there is no limitation on resource capacity as there is in systems that involve a server.

2. Greater cost efficiency. An IDC study found that serverless platforms reduce operating costs by an average of 60% in five years, and also that they are 89% faster when deploying technological solutions. In that same report, the market consulting firm estimated a five-year average ROI of 409%. In addition to eliminating the costs associated with infrastructure ownership, it also eliminates the need to manage servers or applications. An additional fact: payments are only required for the time it takes to run the application, which takes the «pay-per-use» model to a new level of efficiency.

3. Greater focus on the business. All the effort that used to be put into provisioning and managing servers, maintaining operating systems or installation, upgrading software or worrying about information security is now focused on optimizing application design, promoting greater business agility and accelerating the organization’s digital transformation.

4. Continuity above all. By their very nature, serverless functions guarantee the highest levels of security (in general, cloud providers that promote this type of service tend to have the highest ratings of security), availability and fault tolerance.

5. Accelerates innovation and time to market. The time between the birth of an idea and its realization is significantly reduced.

Servers still exist in a serverless world. But they no longer generate any concern or constitute any obstacle for the organization to put all its resources at the disposal of business expansion.