Serverless approaches are an emerging but rapidly maturing paradigm for organizations looking to deliver modernized applications while minimizing operational friction and overhead. With markets tightening across the globe and an increasingly competitive environment for tech talent, serverless is an excellent fit for organizations that want to focus on writing code for the business and to enable world-class customer experiences.

Serverless Computing Delivers Advantages For Cloud-Native Development Teams

Teams that embrace serverless development enjoy several advantages:

  • Servers become a managed service. While “serverless” application code still runs on a server, the cloud provider takes care of provisioning and management, and developers only need to worry about writing business logic. This benefits the development organization by lowering up-front expenses and frees developers to focus on creating and extending the functionality of their applications without any capacity constraints.
  • Deployments are faster and easier to manage. The serverless approach eliminates the need to manually deploy code to servers or perform complex back-end configurations to take new capabilities into production. Applications can be built from scratch, patched, or extended one function at a time with minimal friction, dependencies, or overhead.
  • Serverless applications scale up and back to zero autonomously. Forecasting scalability requirements for new applications is a high-stakes game that often forces companies to choose between high-cost flexible solutions and frustrated customers when usage spikes beyond expectations. Serverless infrastructure scales automatically as usage increases and powers down at set intervals as demand subsides.
  • Serverless only charges organizations for what they use. Functions only run when invoked, triggering serverless infrastructure to deploy and power down as needed. For applications well suited to this paradigm, this carries tremendous cost benefits as charges accrue in time increments measured in milliseconds of usage.

To Benefit From Serverless Approaches, Developers Must Embrace Four Best Practices

Serverless development enables application developers and cloud-native development leaders to focus on shipping code rather than provisioning infrastructure, but technology choices alone won’t deliver these benefits. Forrester’s Serverless Development Best Practices report reveals four best practices that developers must adopt to unlock serverless benefits for their organizations, including designing services as ephemeral instances, pairing function-as-a-service platforms with event-driven microservices, designing functions with autoscaling in mind, and embracing changing with fault-tolerant services.