4 Facts About Serverless Computing

Servers have been a fairly important part of modern businesses for quite some time. As the name suggests, they serve information in a number of different ways. You have file servers, that enable a business to file share without putting data at risk while in transit. There are web servers, that some businesses might use to host their websites.

Then there are database servers that, as you may have guessed, are used to host databases that a business uses. These are just a few of the basic functions that servers fulfill in business, but in today’s age of Cloud Computing, a new era of serverless computing is beginning to replace some of the services that servers have traditionally provided.

What is serverless?

With today’s technology, more and more businesses are looking to develop their own IT solutions in-house. In particular, businesses want to be able to make and run their own applications.

Traditionally, this would have been fraught with complications, not only because of the work involved in building apps but also because of the work needed to get an app to run on a server or the Cloud.

This process is made much easier by serverless computing. Unlike what the name very clearly implies, serverless computing is not truly serverless. What the name refers to is the user experience.

Serverless computing is a service usually run by a Cloud service provider – this means that the Cloud Provider takes responsibility for much of the infrastructure, meaning that users only have to concern themselves with application-level architecture. This offers IT admins a much more lightweight environment to build apps, where they can focus purely on the functionality of the final product.

TechQuarters, one of the top IT Support Services Companies that UK businesses have been working with for over a decade, claims that serverless computing is a great solution for small and medium-sized businesses looking for a lightweight solution that lets them develop and deploy apps for their users or their customers.

Below are 4 key facts about serverless computing:

1. Rapid deployment

Traditionally, if you wanted to deploy new applications via your servers, you would need to dedicate time to provisioning the servers, ensuring that your development, test, and production servers were all configured identically, etc.

However, as serverless computing means the users’ responsibility ends at the application level, you don’t need to worry about any of that. Development operations become much more straightforward, allowing businesses to deploy new apps in a fraction of the time.

2. Rapid scaling

Let’s say the workload or the traffic for your serverless application suddenly sees a rapid uptick. If you were running the app on your own in-house servers, you would need to provision additional servers to support the load and traffic yourself.

But with serverless computing, the service provider automatically spins up servers to support the increased demand. Inversely, if the demand suddenly drops, the additional servers close down. Scaling is all done automatically and, therefore, very quickly.

3. Cost-efficiency

Like with a lot of cloud services, serverless computing is a scalable, subscription-based service. What this means is users only pay for what they are using. Sometimes, businesses pay for Cloud capacity big enough to manage peak demands – but during average demand, that extra capacity is sitting there, costing the business money. But as serverless computing scales automatically, it is much more cost-effective.

4. Better security

As serverless computing is provided by a Cloud service provider, you are essentially benefitting from all of the security investments that the service provider has made to protect their own infrastructure. If you were developing, hosting, and deploying apps on servers you had set up and configured yourself, they will only be as secure as you know how to make them.

On the other hand, Cloud service providers invest billions of dollars into their security infrastructure, and you can have access to that security as well.