The case for serverless
Serverless brought a paradigm shift in how infrastructure management can be simplified or reduced to near zero. However, this doesn't mean that there are no servers, but it abstracts out all management responsibilities from the customer. When you're delivering software, infrastructure management and maintenance is always an ongoing engineering cost and adds up to the operational cost – not to mention the engineering cost of having people manage the infrastructure for it. The ability to build lightweight microservices, on-demand APIs, and serverless event processing pipelines has a huge impact on the overall engineering cost and feature rollouts.
One thing we haven't talked about much is the cost model of FaaS. While only part of the serverless landscape, its billing model is a testament to the true nature of serverless. All cloud vendors charge for FaaS based on the memory and execution time the function takes for a single run. When used with precision, this cost model can shave off a lot of money from your cloud budget. Right-sizing the function and optimizing its code becomes a necessary skill for developers and will lead to a design-for-performance-first mindset.
As we will see in Part 2 of this book, cloud vendors are heavily investing in building and providing serverless services as demand grows. The wide array of BaaS category services that are available to us is astounding and opens up a lot of possibilities. While not all business use cases can be converted to serverless, a large chunk of business use cases will find a perfect match in serverless.
