Key Considerations Before You Go Serverless
Today, one of the most sought-after trends in the cloud engineering space is the pace at which businesses are adopting serverless architecture for their enterprise application development.
Studies estimate that the global market for serverless architecture will be worth over USD 21.1 billion by 2025.
With several advantages lined up, there will be an obvious rush from enterprises to quickly join the trend. But, before hopping into the trend, there are some key areas that need to be considered while evaluating the migration to serverless.
Let us examine the top five considerations for enterprises before they opt for a serverless architecture:
Cost implications
Serverless computing transfers the entire weight of your digital backend to a cloud provider. It is true that cloud computing is lauded as a much more affordable option compared to traditional on-premises computing infrastructure. Going serverless is by no means a cheaper proposition. Your cloud provider will bill you according to the volume of transactions and services consumed for the same, in addition to the traditional cloud costs associated with storage and computing. There are chances that serverless options will eat a significant share of a business’s cloud budget if the transition is not managed efficiently. One of the best ways to counter this issue is to prioritize investments in serverless computing. Evaluate the functions that need a transition into the cloud and then migrate them according to the priority of business and follow a gradual roadmap of end-to-end transition. This leaves more room for individual services to grow and realize their ROI faster while offering a cushion for your business to shore up finances.
Developer awareness
Serverless computing brings in a paradigm shift to the way enterprise applications are built and deployed in a cloud ecosystem. It is obvious that traditional development practices would need a makeover to enable a seamless transition into serverless. While there is no mandatory requirement for developers to be aware of all service level configurations, it will be highly useful if they are able to perform high-level configurations on cloud services to suit unique development requirements. Developers can set up and test the basic configurations for a particular function for readiness and then hand over the baton to the ops team for further customization, optimization, and execution of the service from the cloud.
Automation requirements
Due to the involvement of multiple parties, going for a serverless architecture for your enterprise architecture requires a planned automation approach as well. From testing to integrations, orchestration of multiple services according to priority, replication of configurations in cloud servers for multiple application instances, etc. can all become a huge overhead if the business leverages manual management of these activities. It is important to plan for automating as many internal configurations as possible, orchestration and testing activities in alignment with expected outcomes. This will help achieve deployment efficiency faster and enable the businesses’ digital infrastructure to run optimally every time.
Selection of vendors
It is important to ensure that while going serverless, steps must be taken to prevent vendor lock-ins. Enterprise applications may require a wide variety of supporting backend services that may be provided by different cloud vendors. Hence, there should be a strategic evaluation of the interoperability of various cloud services that can be accessed via APIs. If locked in by a particular vendor, then future migrations to other cloud services would become very challenging owing to multiple dependencies on the vendor. It is important to have a flexible architectural arrangement that lets your business applications avail a diverse range of services from different providers depending on demand.
Control over availability of services
When an enterprise relies on third-party cloud services to power its core digital infrastructure, it is important to ensure that all services are reliable and available for consumption at any point in time. There could be situations where disruptions can happen solely because of the failure or incapacity of the cloud service that provides the logical processing for applications. When enterprises fail to establish control over such critical needs of their digital systems, there is a high degree of risk that lurks in the dark. To prevent such a disruptive scenario, it is important to evaluate and finalize SLAs with different cloud service providers and make them accountable for the continuous availability of backend services.
Serverless computing can enable businesses to gain a competitive advantage and innovative service expansion courtesy of different cloud providers. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach that makes serverless the ideal choice for application development. Leaders must evaluate the risks and make calculated moves to avoid being embroiled in risky and costly endeavors. It is better to have appropriate guidance and strategic advisory before making the switch to serverless. This would enable better ROI and faster results from serverless implementations.
Would you like to work on such exciting technologies? Check out our open positions.
