Firstly, serverless doesn’t really mean serverless, servers are still used, it just means that you as a company don’t need to worry about the cloud server-side of computing, memory, CPU etc.
It is a pay-as-you-go model that allows a service to only use the CPU and memory when it’s needed and it’s on-demand 24/7 whenever you need it.
From a finance perspective there are a number of advantages:
- Firstly you only pay when you absolutely need to. There are no ongoing costs for this service and servers are not sitting doing nothing.
- Secondly, it makes the execution of computing services very efficient, but also from a cost, performance and scaling perspective. Used correctly you will never need to worry about a spike in traffic on Black Friday for example.
- Maintenance, support and operations costs are reduced because the team no longer worries about these servers (virtual servers).
So what’s the takeaway? Why doesn’t everyone move to Serverless Computing?
There are a few things to understand about serverless that complicates an implementation.
Firstly there is vendor lock-in. Once you start down the serverless route you need to choose a vendor and stick with it. The code isn’t easily transferable.
These are the different flavours of serverless:
- Amazon AWS Lambda
- Microsoft Azure Functions
- Google Cloud Functions
The next consideration is that you can’t just start using serverless, you need to have a serverless element to your cloud strategy where new software development projects build with serverless in mind.
Serverless isn’t for everyone. When a request is made to do some “computing work” it takes a second or so to start up. This is fine for most applications but applications that require very low latency, serverless is not suitable.
Finally, skills are expensive in this domain right now and very sought after, so it’s likely you will need to invest in training and maybe consultants to get your development team up to speed.
Kumoco Cloud Manager, ServiceNow Edition can help you make savings up to 40% on your current cloud configuration costs and even a serverless configuration can be mis-managed. With fully automated recommendations your cloud and your cloud costs can be under control at the click of a button.
Kumoco are cloud management experts providing ServiceNow customers with the world’s most comprehensive cloud management solution, powered by and built on the ServiceNow platform.
