The genesis of DevOps is attributed to the need to break down the silos and improve collaboration across teams. However, despite all its benefits and contributions in the business space, it is very challenging to adopt DevOps. Let’s understand why that’s the case and how serverless computing comes to the rescue.
Why Is Adopting DevOps Challenging?
DevOps is adopted by most businesses to enhance product development speed efficiently, but it often involves the implementation of new infrastructure and adjustment of existing practices. Instead of focusing on the development efforts, teams spend a lot of time managing the server infrastructure. The attention of developers gets divided due to circular maintenance work.
Not every organization has the time and resources to carry out heavy server maintenance activities. Serverless comes to the rescue here. It tackles the challenges of DevOps and also promotes its adoption.
Serverless Computing Comes to the Rescue
Serverless has gone from cutting-edge technology to mainstream as developers find it easy and cost-effective. For the same reason, the adoption of serverless computing has exploded in popularity:
- The serverless market is expected to reach $21.1 billion by 2025.
- Over 40% of IT professionals have already adopted serverless architecture.
- Over 50% of Amazon Web Service users utilize the serverless function.
Serverless architecture allows developers to build applications without any headache of managing infrastructure. It enables developers to develop the product with serverless code without having to:
- Provision server
- Maintain the uptime of the server
- Create a test environment on the server
This frees up the time and resources of the team for product development and accelerates innovation. Serverless architecture can be the perfect solution for businesses wanting their apps to run at scale and looking to unburden themselves from heavy server maintenance.
How Serverless Platforms are Improving DevOps
The purpose of adopting DevOps is to speed up the development process and improve the end-user experience, but it can prove too expensive to manage time and resources. Serverless tools come into play here. Serverless architecture makes it easier to create cloud-based applications. Although servers are still present in this architecture, the cloud service provider takes care of everything. And that’s where businesses can focus on creating exceptional products.
One of the greatest benefits of serverless architecture is that it offers a pay-as-you-go model. In this case, businesses only need to pay for the resources used. For example, users pay for the duration and number of invocations while using AWS Lambda. This model lowers the business cost significantly. Moreover, serverless technology is fully managed and auto-scalable. The fully-managed Docker containers can be operated without provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure. This benefits DevOps initiatives since the containers can also be used to build, test, and deploy applications.
Serverless architecture also reaps the benefits of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) tools to build, test, and deploy the code using automation. Implementing DevOps using serverless architecture allows businesses to adopt unique CI/CD modeled to the application requirements, supportive services, and usage-based cost models.
Benefits of Using DevOps with Serverless Computing
Serverless has the potential to transform IT operations. It encourages the utilization of DevOps through the decomposition of software systems into smaller components, leading to better decision-making. With the easily modifiable IT infrastructure, serverless overcomes the challenge of tightly coupled components that leads to easy deployments and rollbacks. Some of the other advantages of serverless computing for DevOps include:
Scalability
Serverless computing offers infinite scalability as the functions can be scaled horizontally as well as elastically based on user traffic. The teams can focus on building the application codes while ensuring that the architecture scales automatically with the application changes without any data loss, outages, and quality issues.
NoOps
The management of infrastructure is completely outsourced in a serverless architecture. So, the in-house teams need not deal with any IT and operational tasks.
No Idle Costs and Time
Unlike server infrastructure, serverless computing charges you per hour based on the usage of virtual machines. With a serverless model, businesses need not pay for unused or idle resources, which can significantly bring down business costs and also reduce the lead time for changes.
Unification
Serverless computing eliminates the silos between different development lifecycle stages to unify the roles of different team members. This unification can accelerate the deployment and delivery of new changes within the application.
Better Quality and Speed
Although DevOps improves the quality and speed through automation, serverless architecture brings down the failure rate through independent development of multiple aspects of the product. It also improves the lead time by allowing the frequent release of smaller components and subsequent integration of feedback. In essence, it helps release incremental software updates and deliver new features in the market faster.
Maximize Your DevOps Benefits with Serverless Today
Implementing DevOps can be extremely challenging, but serverless can make it easier with auto-scalability, fully-managed services, and a pay-as-you-go model. Serverless computing can work wonders with DevOps by allowing a vast array of applications to run faster at a lower cost, ensuring higher efficiency in development speed and code reliability.
The serverless concept is constantly evolving to solve maximum development and operational challenges. Interested in adopting serverless computing for your business? Get in touch with us to discuss your requirements.