What is Serverless and Serverless Backend in an Application?

Serverless computing is an application development model where you can build and deploy applications on third-party managed server infrastructure. Serverless Model offers automatic scaling, pay-per-use cost-effectiveness, and faster deployment by abstracting server management tasks such as operating system management, security patches, file system and capacity management, load balancing, monitoring, and logging.

Serverless Backend uses Serverless Functions to run services which are event driven and starts only when it's triggered. Serverless Backend is suited for Event-Driven and variable workload. Thus, you don't have pay hourly cost for VMs which may not get utilized when a Business transitions to Digital initially. You only pay for what you use which also means you pay nothing for idle resources. It is very cost efficient and allows Startups and Small-to-Medium scale businesses to provide their services fast and with ease.

What are the use cases of Serverless Backend Architecture?

There are multiple use cases in which Serverless Architecture provides efficiency and scalability. It includes:

a) Serverless APIs: Using set of Serverless functions for providing application logic using API Gateways.
b) Event Schedulers: Scheduling time-based, rate-based or CRON based schedules that invokes services at given time or periodically.
c) Batch Processing: Processing huge amount of data that runs once in a week or month, like business reports at the end of the month.
d) Static Website Hosting: Serverless containers can be used to host static websites, which only runs when users click on website URL, providing huge cost benefits.
e) Event-Driven Applications: Serverless architecture provides event-driven apps and services, that scales to millions of invocations and provides serverless function orchestration.
f) Business process automation: Using Serverless approach to automate business processes that are tedious and time-consuming, thus automating mundane manual tasks easily and in cost-efficiant way.
f) Real Time Analytics: Using Serverless functions that streams continuous data like user clicks, that are processed and analyzed in real-time in milli-seconds, thus providing insights, alerts for faster business decisions.

How is the pricing model of Serverless Architecture vs Traditional Self-Managed VM Architecture?

Serverless Architecture provides pay-per-use cost model with granular and millisecond billing. For e.g. cost is calculated for the amount of time a Serverless Function with some business logic runs. So, in this way cost is incurred only when the functions are called.

In contrast, in Self-Managed VM Architecture you are charged for VM on hourly basis, which is suitable for stable workload but, even in idle periods like when your application usage by users is lowest, you still incur same houly cost. Also, over-provisioning of resources like CPU, Storage and bandwidth without its usage incur higher costs.
Below are the differences from price perspective - [ Serverless vs VM ]

a) Pay-per-use vs Hourly charged
b) No idle time cost vs Idle time incurs cost
c) Best for unpredictable workloads vs Best for stable workloads

How is Serverless Backend Architecture great for Startups and Businesses transitioning to Digital?

Serverless Architecture provides great benefit for Businesses and Startups that enables cost-efficient operations and faster-time-to market.

a) Cost-efficiency: Businesses wanting to transition to digital don't have to worry about un-utilized resources or over-provisioning because of the pay-per-use model. You only pay for when your service is used. Startups whose user base grows over period of time benefit from the same because they doesn't have to pay a fixed amount when service utilization is less.
b) Automatic scaling: Cloud providers manage the infrastructure for auto-up-scaling, down-scaling reducing efforts and operational burden.
c) Developer Efficiency: Developers can focus on applications rather than configurations and operations work that take a lot of time and cost thus enabling focus on application development, customer feedbacks and easily deploying changes quickly.
d) Service and Product focus: By taking away the operational burden, business can focus on their product or services, utilizing much time in business activities and application improvements.
e) Faster time to market: Serverless model enables to drastically reduce time-to-market with operational tasks taken care by cloud providers thus developers focus most time on building products and services.

How We at KrishnamayiST help your Business or Startup to Go Digital With Serverless Technology?

We know that Businesses who want to make a start into the digital world hesitate because of unpredictable response and unwanted expenses. Startups that are innovative, that wants to try-out something new, to bring some new service for people also worry about unwanted expenses and unpredictable responses. But, we can help you with your digital transition and innovation. With our Serverless-First approach, we will help you with most cost-efficient development and operation of your business services and products so you never hesitate to start.

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