There is an unprecedented growth of technology underway. Organisations are moving from bare metal, self-hosted machines to the cloud. There is a lot to innovate within the cloud environment and one of the hottest topics of software development is Serverless.
Serverless is the cloud-native architecture that allows you to shift more of your operational responsibilities to the cloud vendor.
It is Serverless computing that makes the Cloud unique. It allows to build and run applications and services quickly without fretting about servers, which a monolithic architecture may not support. It runs and scales as required and is highly available besides managing other operational activities such as a server or cluster provisioning, patching, running system maintenance, and capacity provisioning.
It boosts the organisation’s innovative capability allowing more time to experiment with the apps and services and ship and deploy changes faster. It empowers developers to design modern applications with agility and it helps organisations with huge cost savings on administrative overhead costs, server provisioning and maintenance. Servers spin up when required only.
This is also a great move towards conserving energy. There is no need for servers to be active 24/7 and they consume energy simply when required.
With all these advantages Serverless still faces criticism. This, in fact, has helped companies like Amazon to sharpen their service offerings for serverless computing.
AWS serverless product portfolio consists of HIPPA and PCI compliant products. Making it easier to build an app by selecting the products as per business requirements and abiding regulations.
Launched in 2014, AWS Lambda has become the talk of the tech-town. It is a compute service for serverless offered by AWS. It lets you run code without servers, it triggers based on events that you configure, and it scales automatically based on demand. With the latest developments, developers can now use any programming language and implement AWS Lambda runtime. With continuous improvisation, now it has become the Cloud architects favourite tool in the box to work with. It acts as the logic layer and synchronises with other AWS services which work under the hood.
AWS has four guiding principles when it comes to serverless computing.
- No servers to provision or manage
- Scales with usage – As data come in
- Pay for value – you do not pay for idle
- Availability and fault tolerance built-in
AWS Lambda checks all four principles and is offered as FaaS. It supports almost any kind of applications or backend services.
There are a lot of places where Lambda shows up today in day to day lives without one realising. Such as some smart home devices for auto heating, cooling, vacuuming, lights, etc. these devices connect with Lambda.
Chatbots for office use and external customer support are powered by Lambda.
Companies are using Lambda for computing in backing web applications.
It is used to handle back ends on IoT devices and mobile applications.
Data processing is the largest use case in Lambda – Financial organisations use it for near real-time streaming analysis of data. Companies are collecting sensory data from IoT devices, beacon information from ads for marketing and targeting audience.
Colibri with its cloud-native prowess helped HSBC to design and implement their new serverless real-time high volume messaging system on the AWS cloud. Which is streaming over 35 million messages per hour from on-premise systems into the cloud, as well as the application architecture powered by AWS Lambda for the event processing systems.
A lot of organisations shy away to migrate or make use of serverless because of the complex structure and microservices involved in the architecture. Hence it becomes important to have an expert on the team.
Colibri stepped in the game early and has helped organisations to go serverless with ease. As an industry recognised leaders Colibri has been helping clients to migrate and build their solutions to a microservices architecture running on serverless computing.
Watch the AWS re:Invent 2018: How HSBC solves business problems using Lambda.
