In a previous article, we discussed serverless hosting and how it differs from traditional cloud hosting. The summary is that serverless is a great option for services that have low utilization and unpredictable load.
The Benefits of Serverless
There are two main benefits that you should keep in mind. First, you only pay for resources that you use with serverless compute. If you are building business software that will only be accessed Monday – Friday, then you could benefit greatly from serverless. We have seen a 60-70% reduction in cost by moving the right workloads to serverless.
Second, serverless can scale up and down to support massive changes in load. If you host a blog and one of your posts take off, you don’t have to worry. Serverless functions on popular cloud platforms like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will scale to support millions of requests. All without you having to lift a finger.
At Tragic Media, we utilized serverless functions to solve a problem for the Walking Dead website and implement a faster, cheaper content management system for SD Sports Acupuncture.
When serverless services are properly configured, there are very few downsides. Instead of worrying about mitigating a large cloud hosting bill or spending time messing around with load balancers, our team can focus on delivering value to the customer.
A third use case is leveraging serverless functions to complete batch jobs. There are a number of small batch jobs that need to be run; for example, processing data for a report every week or scanning a database and providing updates every hour.
Because these serverless functions have their own resources, they won’t compete with your main production workload and will not slow down the experience for your end users.
For instance, we recently built an integration for Santa Fe Christian Schools which syncs records between Hubspot CRM and Blackbaud organization management software. The script sits in a serverless function which is executed on a regular interval. This approach keeps ongoing costs low and maintenance is rarely, if ever, needed.
Conclusion
At Tragic Media, we have a diverse toolkit that we can access. Serverless is a useful tool and, when used properly, can drive serious business results.
Are you looking to improve your software infrastructure? Tragic Media has 10+ years of experience, building everything from MVPs for startups to enterprise-grade business applications. Get a free consultation today.
