The evolution of cloud computing has produced some interesting phenomena in recent times. One of those is serverless hosting, which seems like an oxymoron but is a revolutionary “fork in the road” type technology. One day we will have to choose between “servers or serverless” environments, much in the same way we used to choose between on premises and cloud hosting.

Over time, it looks like more and more organisations will adopt a serverless software architecture, prompting the eventual question, is it time for your organisation to go serverless?

Serverless is a special kind of software architecture whereby the application logic is executed in an environment without a visible operating system. The key difference between a serverless environment and a simple virtual machine is that serverless does not have an interface for the user to engage in things like server provisioning.

The responsibility of provisioning relies solely on the service provider. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a hosting machine there (as that would be ludicrous), but the management and control factor is strategically based on the service provider instead of the recommendations of DevOps person. Deploying applications through a serverless infrastructure could take the pressure off developers to build “within the box”.

The best way that serverless can be described is as a back-end as a service, or BaaS. The concept behind this is for a third party being given the use case for the server-side logic, the third party can deploy the application.

As applications can be built with similar use cases on the back-end, third parties can manage them effectively without the input of the business. This type of BaaS frees up businesses to focus on other areas. Though there are other ways that serverless can manifest itself (for instance using stateless functions), but at its core serverless is about outsourcing the back-end to a third party.

For an organisation to switch to serverless, what it needs to consider more than anything is the cost it currently spends on not just DevOps, but development time focused on deployment. Most organisations don’t realise that their time delay on releases aren’t just testing for bugs, but deployment also. A pretty decent chunk of project costs are spent on deployment, and if things are really complex, hiring an external DevOps consultant can push costs up even further.

I was speaking to a client recently about this. He mentioned that the high demand in getting a DevOps consultant on hand every release was starting to delay some of his release dates. The DevOps role as a whole seems to be stretched thinly as it is, so it would make sense to relieve some of this pressure through adopting a serverless methodology, to bring DevOps out of the operations side and more into the strategy side of I.T., where they are really needed.

Working in an Agile environment basically means that anything is possible. If you’re open to the possibility of using a serverless environment, you could find yourself making a saving in time, money and most importantly, the hassle of decision making.