The cost savings of AWS Serverless Computing…may not be as far away as you think
When discussing Serverless architectures with customers, I often hear “If I was starting from scratch, that’s the direction I would go.” However, if your existing applications are already using server based databases, web servers and other middle tier servers, you don’t need to completely rewrite your applications to achieve some of the benefits of Serverless architectures.
What are some of the benefits of the AWS Serverless computing architecture?
- Having servers up 24x7x365 can be very expensive over time. Only pay for what you use; no servers to run, no servers to pay for.
- Reduced complexity; Ability to focus on the problem domain as opposed to infrastructure management. No cluster provisioning, OS management, or patch management.
- Unlimited scalability; no capacity planning required. High availability is handled for you.
Moving existing applications toward a Serverless model can be done in several steps iteratively.
- Custom middleware applications need to be assessed to ensure all applications state is stored outside of the running applications. When determining the work that needs to be done, always lean towards choosing AWS Serverless technologies to replace any existing functionality on your running servers. We have helped clients move applications with over 100k lines of code into Lambdas this way, eliminating large numbers of servers and considerably reducing cost and complexity of their running infrastructure.
- Other middleware servers such as message queues (Kafka, ApacheMQ) or caching servers (MemCache, Redis) move towards the AWS Managed Services for this layer.
- For database servers, we’ve helped clients port existing server based databases to Aurora Serverless. This enabled minimal refactoring of client code and provided scale and availability at considerably reduced cost.
While moving to AWS Serverless will reduce costs, customers also enjoy a faster pace of innovation primarily due to reclaimed time of developers not being bogged down with infrastructure issues.
Interested in learning more?
Schedule a call with one of our solution architects to see how your organization can benefit from an AWS Serverless architecture.