We are in Age of Software, every business today regardless of its domain is driven by software. Software has tend to become the enabler and the differentiator for business. To get the perspective of what actually it means, think of Amazon and its impact on every business it had where its path crossed, in fact, I am not sure if anybody has stated this earlier, Amazon has pioneered the Art of Retail as a Service (RaaS) :) . Software has become so ubiquitous today that every industry appears to be a software industry, the line differentiating them has become rather very thin, example Netflix (Entertainment/Media or Software), Uber (Transportation or Software), Airbnb (Hospitality or Software?), Amazon (Retail or Software), the list goes on. This reality converges to the fact that every business demands a Software division.
When you deal with software, you have a lot to worry about, right from designing and developing your software to owning and maintaining infrastructure that runs it. A typical business executive would like to focus more on Business rather than software nuances that drives it. Unlike the real estate that’s needed for the business operations, the software infrastructure is totally a different ball game. Software and it’s hosting infrastructure tend to get irrelevant rather soon and demands flexibility based on changing business growth and conditions. Infrastructure also needs to keep in pace to support ideas that crop up, get realized, tested, and sometimes sustained with good returns but most of the time gets fizzed out, this engine that drives the change and innovation should not be economically taxing in terms of capital expenses that tend to hang on as liability in case of a failed endeavor. This changing dynamics also has ripple effects on the talents that keep the show running.
In ideal world, wouldn’t it be simply great if you could just buy or rent the software you need instead of building and maintaining it? Well, in some cases where your need is well defined and mainstream with fair amount of variations, you have SaaS offerings to take care of it; but for other cases where your software is your differentiator or specific to your unique requirements, you have a choice of building your solution based on Serverless framework and in the process making your solution infrastructure agnostic (to certain degree). So if SaaS gives you almost total independence from maintaining software, Serverless gives you a model to go half way that route by taking care of infrastructure needed to run your software.
With Serverless the whole paradigm of building software solution changes, instead of traditional way of developing software components and hosting it in your managed infrastructure, you build solutions using other services that comes with “batteries included” oh I mean “Servers Included”. With Serverless you assemble solutions akin to Lego where every service is a Lego block which you integrate together to build your solutions.
When we deal with the concept of Serverless, it’s important to understand that Serverless is an abstraction that gives the developer of the solution from underlying infrastructure needed to run it, this abstraction could come from the organization itself or from public cloud infrastructure companies like AWS and Azure. So, the term Serverless is relative from the standpoint of end Software developer, but in reality, someone else solution is abstracting the nuances of hardware for you. Effectively Serverless paradigm is adding another layer of abstraction, making developers and organization to focus more on the software aspect of the solution. This abstraction aspect is evolving and turns out to be the future of Software development. For those skeptical of this model and believe that you can’t focus on the solution by forgoing the control of your infrastructure, it might be true for certain edge cases where you need have more control on the underlying hardware but for most of the mainstream solutions this would require more of a mental shift of building solutions with other Serverless services. A good analogy of a similar evolution would be the days where we coded using Assembly language and programmers had complete control over the Registers, Program Counters and Memory and decided on what moves in and out of this Registers. Transitioning to higher level language like Java and its likes, we have let off this control to abstractions layers that took care of it. We are in a kind of similar transition with Serverless simply extending this abstraction to higher level of resources that runs our code.
With Serverless your solution stack is quite simplified, From Authentication, Middleware to Database, you assemble your solution from Managed services rather than building each of its stack ground-up. This approach helps you focus on your actual business solutions, decreases the time to market and translates your CapEx to OpEx with significant cost savings in most cases.
Hence with Serverless you end up owning the integration and logic that matters you the most and forgo the ownership of its underlying infrastructure and its intricacies.
Having said this, Serverless model is continuously evolving and would gradually make sense for variety of use cases. Success of Serverless offerings highly depends on the economic model in which it operates. Typically cloud offerings are priced based on the amount of resource used (compute/storage/networking) and the duration of consumption and depending on the use case price needs to be calibrated such that it economically makes sense to stop managing one’s own infrastructure. As this model gains popularity and well tested, you would be seeing innovative pricing mechanism that would make Serverless obvious choice. In fact, these whole exodus towards cloud that we are witnessing today would end up in either SaaS or a Serverless Solutions.
We are in the age of less. From Serverless to Driverless (Think Uber without driver) the journey is towards getting and paying for what we need instead of owning and maintaining what serves our need. It’s here and It’s evolving…
