Go from idea to market faster with AWS serverless technology

Key advantages of embedding AWS serverless computing

1. Adapt quickly and automatically scale in response to demand

With serverless technology, infrastructure management tasks like capacity provisioning and patching can be handled by your cloud services provider, such as AWS, freeing you and your teams to focus solely on the code that serves your customers.

Seamless invisibility of server controls and automatic scaling of server resources (such as from zero-to-peak demand) can enable faster customer response times and lower cloud operational costs that are based on actual web app traffic. If your web application sees frequent highs and lows in demand, for example, or it’s affected by seasonality, operational costs may be lower due to the AWS pay-as-you-go pricing model.

2. Optimize how your team spends its time

Serverless computing can make development teams more efficient. In the typical public cloud computing service, such as AWS EC2, developers often wind up with the “side job” of configuring server resources for the servers on which they develop apps. This may include tasks such as reallocating server resources, server-specific maintenance and coding to support a specific server platform. In a serverless environment, however, application architects and developers can concentrate on higher priority needs and have the opportunity to build, iterate and deploy more rapidly.

In addition, most serverless services support advanced deployment automation methodologies that can reduce deployment and, when required, rollback times, thereby reducing the risk of a release. This pairs seamlessly with the agile development approach, which requires you to make frequent and smaller releases and helps you to be more flexible and get to a finished product much faster. A greater level of flexibility and efficiency is important for organizations to react in real-time, especially for sectors such as healthcare and retail.

Serverless computing in action

The opportunity

Our team worked with a company, in the education industry, that was using an aging, third-party solution for processing incoming payments. The company was struggling for several reasons:

• The third-party system relied on a monolithic application that couldn’t efficiently handle change requests, making them expensive and slow to implement.
• Frequent downtimes were required for upgrades and patches.
• There was limited visibility into the system and it was difficult to troubleshoot failed orders.

The solution

After gathering a full understanding of their current state and the goals the company wanted to achieve, we began by building a proof-of-concept (POC). In both the POC and the final platform architecture, we broke up their complex, monolithic architecture into individual components as a microservices-based system, to help their team iterate and deploy new features faster.

During the architecture design process, we performed a detailed analysis of eligible services from AWS. Considerations included cost, maintenance overhead, availability of skills for ongoing development and maintenance of the solution, and the ability to integrate with existing systems and services.

The active POC allowed the company to see how its new serverless architecture would operate. The POC environment integrated with its other third-party systems, demonstrating how a serverless alternative would pay off in real time.

Convinced about the merits of the AWS serverless computing approach, the company then tasked us with transforming the POC into a full-blown production build of the entire set of features. It was extremely important to the company that a flexible serverless infrastructure was put in place so that its teams could easily deploy updates. We were able to scale up the development process by allocating development of individual microservices to separate teams working in parallel and helped the company achieve their tough go-live deadline with a successful launch of the platform.

AWS tools and services used in the serverless infrastructure design

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database engine
• AWS Fargate, a compute engine for Amazon ECS that runs containers without having to manage servers or clusters

In the end, the combination of serverless and microservices was the right fit and the new serverless platform resulted in several benefits:

1. Fewer and shorter downtimes because updates and patches were handled by AWS. The company had the ability to isolate failures and was able to span the services across multiple zones to increase availability.
2. Faster releases due to the reduced impact of changes with microservices-based applications and the ability to support advanced DevOps pipelines.
3. Cost reductions because of serverless’ automatic ability to scale up and down to match seasonal loads. The solution also decreased maintenance overhead.

How AWS serverless computing can benefit your business

Serverless is used to solve many different types of software challenges, including web applications and portals. Data and analytics is also a growing area for serverless and is being driven by advances from AWS, with new serverless services designed for data. We are increasingly seeing organizations look at embedding serverless into their application modernization efforts, resulting in faster speed to innovation.

Keep in mind that there’s a learning curve involved with serverless adoption, and existing systems may need substantial modification to realize the full potential. Your organization should be prepared to invest the time upfront or hire specialists who already have serverless experience.