What is serving?

Serving is an important step for ensuring the business impact of the applications when we develop the life cycle of application development. The application we have developed needs to be available to the user so that they can use it. For example, let’s say we have developed a game. After the development, if the game just stays on the developer’s machine, then it is not going to be of any use to the users. So, the developer needs to bring the game to the users by serving it through a serving platform such as Apple Store, Google Play Store, and web servers.

So, serving can be seen as a mechanism to distribute our applications/services to end users. The end users can be different based on the applications/services we develop. Serving creates a bridge of communication between the two parties: the developer and the users. This bridge is vital for the business success of our application. If we don’t have people using our service, then we are not gaining any business value or impact from the applications we’ve developed. That’s what we have seen in the past when big corporate companies’ servers go down for some time: they incur a huge amount of loss. Facebook (Meta) lost ~65 million US dollars due to its outage for some hours in October 2021, as per Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/10/05/facebook-outage-lost-revenue/?sh=c1d7d03231ad.

The development-to-serving process usually forms the life cycle of the service or application.

For example, let’s consider the life cycle of web application development in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 – Web development life cycle

The developer develops the website. Then, the website is served using a web server. Only after that are the users able to use the website. The cycle can continue through collecting feedback from users, improving the website, and serving again on the web server.

Now we know what serving is, let’s look at what we are actually serving.