Serverless architecture -a game-changer for Digital-first companies

While delivering a digital service, customer experience is enabled by advanced technologies that are shaping the enterprises of tomorrow.

Real-time information is available through IoT is used by industries to understand customer behavior, usage pattern, and product feedback which further helps in improving the offer and delivery mechanism. Tech-savvy customers are demanding a digitally connected world and that is putting pressure on Digital-first companies to ensure a scalable, available, and agile digital landscape.

Digital-first companies always look for opportunities where a business could leverage cloud and API integration technologies, where customer and employee experiences can be improved, and technology costs can be CAPEXed.

Why use a serverless architecture?

Serverless architecture scores higher than traditional cloud-based or server-centric infrastructure on many counts: It offers greater scalability, more flexibility, and quicker time to release, at a reduced cost base. Also, the developer does not need to worry about purchasing, provisioning, and managing backend servers. A vendor provides backend services as they are needed.

• As the server management is done by the vendor, DevOps investment can be optimized. 

• Developers can focus on creating applications without any server capacity constraints. 

• This being pay as you go model, developers are only charged for the server space they use. In contrast, in a traditional 'server-full' architecture, developers must purchase the server capacity, regardless of its usage. 

• Inherent scalability: Applications built with a serverless infrastructure will scale up as the user base grows or usage increases. A serverless application will be able to handle an unusually high number of requests just as well as processing a single request from a single user. A traditional application with a fixed server capacity can be overwhelmed by a sudden increase in usage. 

• Quick deployments and updates: In serverless infrastructure, there is no need to upload code to servers or do any backend configuration to release a working version of an application. Developers can quickly update, patch, fix, or add new features to an application.

• No latency as application functions run on servers that are close to the end user instead of the original server. 

Digital-first companies at different digital maturity levels are adopting serverless architecture as a part of their digital strategy 

• Digital-first companies who want to decrease their go-to-market time and build lightweight, flexible applications that can be expanded or updated quickly may benefit from serverless computing. 

• Having inconsistent usage patterns of applications is commonplace with Digital-first companies. Applications with inconsistent usage patterns will benefit the most from serverless architecture. For such applications, purchasing a fixed server capacity is not a wise business decision. An on-demand serverless setup will provide necessary resources when needed and will not incur costs during lean application usage. 

• As companies embark on their digitization journey, they decide to migrate their monolithic applications to serverless FAAS. The key factors driving this decision are lower flexibility, limited scalability, and the higher operational cost of monolithic applications. Migration is done in a stepwise manner where monolithic applications are moved to a hybrid model of monolithic and serverless and then finally moved to a serverless environment.

• The customer experience platform adopted by Digital-first companies is another area where serverless architecture is gaining acceptance. Customer experience layers are becoming leaner so that developers can focus more on creating the best customer experience than worrying about managing and deploying the business logic layer. Applications are built using a lightweight customer experience layer with a combination of Serverless functions in the backend and integration with other cloud services. 

• Monolithic Content management systems pose challenges like being channel-centric, limited scalability and agility, and difficulty in integration with other tools. These monolithic systems are now replaced by a headless (API-first) approach. It provides on-demand scaling and lower operational administration costs. 

Conclusion

Digital-first companies should focus on building a sustainable competitive advantage through world-class customer experience and leave the operational management part to the vendor providing serverless capability. This is relevant for big enterprises as they can modernize their monolithic stack with a serverless approach. Also, startup digital companies should consider a serverless first approach as their design strategy to bring velocity and agility to their application development program.