First there was cloud computing, now there is serverless. More than just a buzzword, serverless applications have several benefits for businesses. The most important upsides are maximized profit and reduced maintenance costs. Companies large and small are choosing serverless application environments. We’ll discuss serverless computing and why Splice made the switch.
For Splice, the choice was simple – we needed the always-on, high-performance benefits of serverless. To help our company grow, we needed to focus on building features for our customers, not on maintaining infrastructure. We rolled out our new architecture in December 2021 and saw profound improvements immediately. Our application performed better, and our efficiency at maintaining the application and speed of new feature development improved.
What is Serverless Computing?
There are no shortage of companies with a “computer closet” or a server room. Racks of computer servers, tucked away in a far corner of the office where their heat and noise won’t bother the workforce and a dedicated staff of wranglers responsible for keeping the systems running 24/7. Application are hosted on these centralized systems, which must be maintained by an IT staff and software developers.
Serverless is a bit of a misnomer. Applications running in a serverless architecture are running on a server, but cost is only accrued for the time and memory to run the application. Serverless applications themselves are written differently than traditional software applications. They are divided into small slices of executable code that carry out a specific task. These cloud functions are then knit together with a framework that calls on this code when a sequence of events occurs. Serverless applications effectively turns on the code to do some quick data processing, and immediately turns off.
The Benefits of Serverless Computing
Automatic scalability
By design, serverless applications are able to scale horizontally across any geographic regions and vertically to meet the load demands wherever they may occur.
Speed of development
Features can be developed faster because the functionality is broken down to smaller units. This means new functionality can be brought online faster with minimal impact to the user.
Higher performance
Applications are executed in the closest geographic proximity to the user resulting in improved responsiveness. In the event of high usage, more computing power is automatically applied to ensure the application is running at its peak.
Lower cost
Modern web applications are idle most of the time. Serverless applications eliminate this idle capacity by switching off and only running when needed. This results in a dramatic reduction in required computing power, and thus a much smaller bill.
Who is Using Serverless?
Serverless provides simplified, scalable and flexible options for modern applications. It's no wonder that most industry leading companies have adopted serverless in some form or another.
Industry giants such as Netflix, T-Mobile, iRobot and the BBC have all embraced serverless. Now, we at Splice can say the same. Seeing the industry trends and the proven capabilities of serverless, we decided to make the switch. In 2021 we redesigned and migrated our entire application to be a 100% end-to-end serverless platform. As a result, our rock-solid logistics integration and automation platform is built to scale to the ever-growing needs of our customers.
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