Why We Love The Serverless Cloud

Competitive advantage doesn’t come from a single source or activity. Innovation, agility, financial gains, and speed to market are just a few of the reasons why one company can get ahead of the competition. In contrast, other companies can struggle with customer satisfaction and market share, eventually succumbing to internal digital transformation failures and external pressure.

Part of crafting a solid competitive advantage comes from using the right tools and solutions that enable your ability to respond quickly to customer needs and market shifts. As we’ve talked about in many previous articles, serverless is one of the toolsets an organization can use to elevate itself to the position of an industry leader.

But why? Why does Big Compass prefer serverless as a competitive tool above others? Because it answers the needs of both the IT and business.

We Love Serverless from the Technology Perspective

Serverless architecture, when planned and executed correctly, is the stuff that technologists’ dreams are made of. A serverless strategy offers flexibility, reliability, and scalability without a great deal of infrastructure burden or management overhead.

LEVERAGING THE ENVIRONMENT — FLEXIBILITY AND INNOVATION

The speed at which services can be stood up and configured on a serverless architecture accelerates the technology team’s ability to respond to business needs. Products and solutions get to market faster because there is less infrastructure and management to worry about.

That speed supports and promotes innovation. New features can be developed quickly and made accessible to a wide variety of customers — from exposing public APIs to publishing services to an internal library. At the same time, teams can enable the features they need thanks to the nearly limitless scalability available and out-of-the-box security so they can focus on innovation.

All of this means that taking an initial use case — like transferring from your iPaaS to a serverless integration solution — creates space for future opportunities and cost savings.

RELIABILITY

There is no need to plan for uptime with serverless. Reliability is an out-of-the-box feature. Not only is that good for your own services, but it means you can pass on your provider’s SLAs to your customers.

Cloud providers offer unmatched SLAs and higher uptime, resulting in fewer customer complaints for your company. Plus, features like autoscaling handle traffic spikes elegantly and easily, so your customers will never be caught without access or service, and your team doesn’t need to worry about servers falling over in the middle of a rush.

SCALABILITY

We’ve already talked a little about the importance of scalability, but it bears repeating. Serverless removes the need for architecture teams to pour hours into designing and configuring systems to handle the most significant spikes and heaviest traffic. Instead, scaling up or out as you onboard new customers is effortless.

AGILITY AND AUTONOMY FOR DEVELOPERS

Developers love serverless as much as we do at Big Compass. Programing language choice is no longer restricted by the underlying architecture or solution, giving them a level of autonomy within your organization’s standards and governance.

For instance, developers aren’t locked into the connectors that come with an iPaaS. Instead, custom integrations can be designed and developed to meet the specific needs of the applications and requirements.

Serverless also makes it easy to stand up microservices implementations. Services can set up behind APIs, behind queues, using the appropriate solution or pattern that makes the most sense.

We Love Serverless from the Business Perspective

Serverless isn’t just a dream for IT. Because of the rapid solution development and release that is possible with the architecture, the business can realize ROI and savings quickly, while improving the customer experience.

ROI

Getting to the ROI of your serverless strategy is a cycle, with the result being a shift from Capex to OpEx.

In the beginning, serverless projects are CapEx as you begin to invest in the implementation of your first initiative. Time and resources, as well as funds, are used to instantiate the use of the new serverless solution and create a solution that can prove its value.

In the next phase, however, stabilization of the implementation leads to the realization of the total cost of ownership and a lower OpEx. Instead of sinking capital into servers or resources, reuse of solutions and the regular costs associated with using a cloud platform is reflected in the business’s operational costs. This phase is nirvana for executives as the business realizes the decreased ongoing cost of operating in a serverless architecture.

The last phase of the cycle is cost optimization. Companies can take control of how money is spent and can define how aggressive they want to be in lowering their OpEx. The key is investing in planning for the future during the initial phases of the ROI cycle.

COST

Cost savings are a very attractive benefit of moving to serverless and can be dramatic as you move from CapEx spending to OpEx.

For instance, Big Compass assisted a client in migrating their integration platform from MuleSoft to AWS. The savings for the business was a staggering 90% reduction in OpEx spend.

REVENUE GENERATION

For customer-facing and direct-to-consumer applications, serverless can even promote revenue generation for the business. Customers can be charged more appropriately as you implement a billing framework into your development lifecycle. Segregating customers, you can roll billing up into an easy-to-use dashboard for customers, even offering a tiered set of packages off of the reports created.

Summary

The benefits to both the business and IT make it easy to understand why we love serverless. It’s the easiest way to plan for your business’s future, allowing you to stand up new services and features quickly and accelerating the realization of cost benefits. Ultimately, leveraging a serverless architecture can elevate your business to the position of industry leader as you prove you have the capabilities to meet the market’s needs.