The technology ecosystems of business organizations are more complex now than ever. Managing the technology architecture poses a big challenge for IT teams. A business organization uses many software applications for day-to-day operations which run on numerous servers that are difficult to manage. If IT teams cannot handle the complexity of modern-day servers, it will deteriorate the service availability. To avoid such a situation, business organizations are leaning towards a serverless architecture.

Understanding serverless architecture

The word ‘serverless’ may sound confusing and allude that servers aren’t involved. However, servers are still important for running software applications. Serverless architecture does not require IT teams to manage and scale servers manually. Software applications can run on third-party cloud services in a serverless architecture. Since you will not depend on manual labor to manage your servers, you can significantly boost service availability.

Third-party cloud vendors help in managing servers, provisioning, scaling databases, and much more. You do not need physical servers for deploying and running your software applications. Serverless architecture can help a business organization slash costs spend on computing tools. Third-party cloud providers handle the computing tasks via functions in a serverless architecture. IT teams do not have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, they can focus on enhancing service reliability with serverless architecture.

How does a serverless architecture function?

FaaS (Functions-as-a-service) are the backdrop of a serverless architecture. The stateless functions help IT teams deploy code on a cloud platform with ease. Stateless functions are distributed and managed completely by the respective cloud vendors. IT teams will write a code that is embedded with business logic. They will also define any event that triggers a function. Once the IT teams have written the code, it is the responsibility of the cloud vendor to execute it and display the results to end-users.

In other words, the backend part of software applications is managed by the respective cloud vendor in a serverless architecture. IT teams can use the vendor functions optionally based on the needs of their software applications. IT teams have to focus more on the frontend in a serverless architecture. With the help of APIs, the requests of web/software applications are forwarded to serverless functions. The vendor will then be responsible for showing the accurate result on the web applications to users. Not only can a business organization cut costs with serverless architecture, but also boost service availability and overall productivity.

What are the advantages of serverless architecture?

• There is no limitation of server capacity with a serverless architecture. A serverless architecture automatically scales as per the requirements of developers. However, the server capacity is scaled according to the demand and not more than what is needed. When you go for the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, you will only invest in the services that are used. Cloud adoption solutions can significantly reduce computing costs.
• Since physical servers are not managed in serverless architecture, a business organization doesn’t need dedicated employees. Business organizations can cut short their DevOps team or can divert them to other important business processes.
• Developers must project the server capacity if they are using traditional servers. If they project more server capacity than required, they end up spending on unused server capacity. With serverless architecture, you can skip the process of predicting server capacity.
• With traditional servers, developers have to work on backend configuration before releasing a web application. With serverless architecture, you can be free from backend configuration before the web application release.
• You do not have to change the complete web application for adding a new function to it. Serverless architecture lets you add a single function easily as the application isn’t a monolithic stack. A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) also benefits from serverless architecture and provides the end-users with what they need.
• In serverless architecture, the user applications aren’t deployed on any origin server. You can run code on user applications from anywhere in a serverless architecture. You can run an application function close on a server that is close to the end-users. By doing so, you can decrease latency and enhance service availability.
• Consider a scenario where user requests on business applications increase drastically. You will have to purchase more server space immediately. In the meantime, user requests will go unnoticed and will hamper the service availability. A serverless application can scale automatically based on user requests.

Due to these benefits, more and more organizations are shifting to a serverless architecture. However, serverless observability remains a challenge for IT teams. To ensure effective serverless observability, business organizations are using AIOps-based enterprise solutions.

Serverless observability with AIOps

In serverless applications, the code is deployed in a distributed manner. Legacy management tools will not work perfectly for serverless applications. Therefore, an AIOps-based enterprise solution is needed to boost observability.

The benefits of serverless observability with AIOps are as follows:

• You can learn about the internal states of your serverless applications with enhanced observability. AIOps based analytics platforms will easily collect the traces that define the flow of serverless applications.
• An AIOps platform will deeply monitor the events in the serverless architecture. It will generate a trigger automatically if an error is encountered in the serverless architecture.
• Multiple events within the serverless architecture can be easily correlated via an effective AIOps based analytics platform. You can also prioritize events within the IT infrastructure via an AIOps based monitoring tool.
• An AI automated root cause analysis solution will quickly pinpoint the serverless application that needs to be fixed. IT teams do not have to waste time finding the source of an error with AIOps.

Around 40% of business organizations have already started using serverless architectures. You can enhance business productivity, scalability, and user experience with a serverless architecture!