Tom Kowalski, chief architect at DaySmart Software, recounts his experience moving the DaySmart team to serverless computing and discusses how the agility and flexibility of managed services have allowed his team of engineers to focus on what really matters: the value they provide to their customers.Â
Serverless computing eliminates the need for IT teams to manage infrastructure elements – like servers, databases, and queues – allowing them to focus on code while minimizing their operational overhead. While some businesses struggle to get their head around the idea of serverless as they feel they may need to give up control over important business data, many businesses that have taken the dive are pleased with the results.Â
In fact, according to Datadog’s State of Serverless ReportOpens a new window , AWS Lambda has already been adopted by nearly half of companies with infrastructure in AWS.
Seven years ago, I was a part of the team at DaySmart Software that moved our infrastructure to serverless. As a company that enables thousands of small businesses to simplify operations, automate client communication, optimize appointment scheduling and payment processing, managing and processing the business data being created daily by these business owners in real-time had proven to be a big challenge.Â
As we realized restructuring our back end was crucial, we quickly got to work on adopting serverless computing for our customer-facing application and workload processing. Since implementation, we have experienced many operational efficiencies with this serverless environment.
1. No Server Management
Since the “servers†are remotely managed by the vendor, developers never touch the servers. This not only has significantly freed up our time to focus on more pressing tasks, but it has also given us the peace-of-mind that our data is secure. There was also no software or runtime to install, maintain, or administer, so I can focus my attention on other activities that directly impact our customers.Â
2. Pay for Value
Rather than being charged by the server unit, we are only charged for what we use. This is because our code only runs when operations are required by the serverless application, and the code automatically adjusts as needed. In contrast, in a traditional “server-full†infrastructure, developers must plan how much server capacity they will need and then purchase that volume, regardless of if they end up using it or not.Â
This has been revolutionary for us as our applications and data pipelines have almost no traffic during nights and national holidays, whereas we can have all-time-high traffic during weekends. Switching to serverless allowed us to save money because we do not have to pay for robust dedicated resources idling during the day and instead pay only for what we use.
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3. Scalability
As we gained more experience with serverless, we found that we could build a separate data analytics pipeline for each customer and scale them separately. Applications built with a serverless infrastructure adapt automatically as the user number grows or usage increases.Â
If a function needs to be run in various occurrences, the vendor’s servers will boot up, run, and end them as required. As a result, our serverless application can handle a high number of inquiries just as well as it can process a single request – something that would overwhelm a traditionally structured application with a fixed amount of server capacity.Â
Serverless delivered numerous advantages for us at DaySmart, such as faster time-to-market, boosted developer productivity, and significant savings in our total cost of ownership. We can now scale its applications and data pipelines dynamically. For organizations seeking ways to enhance their infrastructure and improve time-to-market, the move to serverless computing is an investment worth making.
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