Why serverless IT architecture is the next-gen cloud service offering for enterprises?

According to a survey by Statista Research Department in 2016, 23% of the respondents were using serverless architecture to utilize chatbots. The global market size for Serverless Computing is expected to reach $7712.7 million by 2026. In 2020, the market size was $6276.6 million. Between 2026 to 2020, experts expect the market size to grow at a CAGR of 20.8%. The growing popularity of Serverless IT architecture is quite evident; however, its upcoming phase shows promising, cost-effective, and transformational trends.

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Serverless is the next-generation cloud service; it not only offers cloud support but also provides complete application functionality. In a traditional cloud, you had to log in yourself to a virtual server. However, in serverless architecture, you run the entire API or functional application programming interface. How does that benefit? Such a serverless setup enables businesses to concentrate on curating value-added functions and characteristics.

The serverless architecture goes way beyond FaaS or “Function as a Service.” It represents an advanced paradigm. What is the most crucial benefit of implementing serverless? Well, companies can easily overcome difficulties like high costs and subsequent demand for high effort. Today, several businesses have adopted serverless IT architecture. These companies confess that utilizing serverless has helped them shift their spending from a Capex to an Opex model. They can cover the total duration of application development that has caused a reduction in overall expenses by 60%.

Shifting your operations to serverless computing can lower your IT budget. Since there is no need to have server hardware, you save costs on maintenance. Also, you only pay for services that you use. Hence, you only pay for services that you use. You get charged based on runtimes. When it comes to attaining a massive transformation at scale, companies choose a Serverless architecture as it offers excellent benefits. It provides all the staple benefits of classic cloud architecture and additional offerings that serve as a serverless architecture. What are the three phases of serverless architecture?

Cloud 1.0 “as a service”:

Cloud computing offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for virtual environments and PaaS or platform as a service for runtime environments. The software as a service or SaaS offering took things to the next level as it offers ready-to-use applications.

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Backend as a service (BaaS):

BaaS is a cluster of several cloud-based services like push notifications, location, storage, authentication, authorization, etc., that are offered to the developers through APIs. To explain it in simple words, we can say that BaaS is a complete software service that third-party providers provide; it is promptly available for developers to utilize or integrate.

Function as a service (FaaS):

FaaS helps develop custom event-driven functions that operate in ephemeral containers (it offers on-demand/as-needed capacity). FaaS can be accessed via APIs. What is the fundamental difference between FaaS and PaaS? The significant difference between them is how the application is composed, deployed, utilized, and scaled. FaaS is way more granular; it is cost-friendly and scalable as per usage.

Offering Advantages in terms of cost and access!

Serverless architecture provides two significant benefits. It offers a “pay-as-you-go model” and a whole stack of technology that helps businesses lower their overall run cost. One can activate the pay-as-you-go model by positioning the functions into production through the serverless environment operator when needed. Hence, a serverless architecture not only helps you in lowering the cost but also lowers idle capacity.

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What is the second integral benefit? The serverless architecture offers ecosystem access for the central infrastructure and complete functionality. What happens due to this? It dramatically lowers the expense of transforming a company’s IT infrastructure. Ecosystem access for functions is accomplished via the provider’s FaaS and BaaS models. So you don’t have to redevelop it for every single client. These two advantages enable companies to gain colossal reusability of existing functionality on an ultra-modern platform.

Challenges businesses may face with serverless architecture.

With some great benefits, the serverless architecture poses a few challenges for companies-

1. The serverless architecture can have issues regarding its complexity as the number of actions required like designing functions, determining size and number of functions, arranging the function calls, testing, and managing functions.
2. In the early phases of development, businesses have to trust the technology and trust the third-party providers during the development as they’ll be managing it.
3. Another challenge businesses face with serverless is that only a few tools can help them debug or monitor the serverless architecture. What type of tools are we talking about? There are only a few operational tools; these tools are essential for remotely debugging or identifying the cause of the failure. They also help monitor the functions running at a third party; however, these tools are very limited in numbers.
4. When it comes to unpredictable scaling, we talk about a high level of uncertainty on expenses. If businesses are not familiar with the costs, the number of executions and the immensity of auto-scaling can be hard to predict.

Embracing the serverless IT architecture

Businesses that are planning to shift their IT systems to serverless architecture must consider these three steps. They must formulate and establish integration with BaaS and SaaS service providers. Secondly, they must know that the more significant architecture will advance to the cloud-based BaaS and FaaS solutions. Hence, they must implement a learning journey for their organization to adopt the new technologies seamlessly. Lastly, they need to ensure that their journey is closing in a new or advanced architecture with a new IT organization.

Many businesses utilize several open APIs to induce FaaS in other apps to deliver an integrated experience and service offerings. As global companies continue to ride along the journey, we can expect many of them to utilize a broader set of FaaS with large cloud providers. The Serverless architecture symbolizes a progressive change in software and infrastructure delivery. The current wave of cloud offers new, vast possibilities of scaling for application development and its maintenance.

At Saffron Tech, we believe that technology is dramatically growing, yet it brings new challenges for businesses to maintain their dependencies. In a future like this, serverless shall be the most desirable solution for enterprises. Even though serverless technology is new, it continues to stay more and more crucial in the coming years. If you want to improve and optimize your operations or business performance, then reach out to our IT experts. We provide top-notch Cloud Migration and Management services without giving deep cuts in your pocket.