Highlight the serverless cost benefits
As you saw in Chapter 1, pay-per-use is a fundamental driver behind serverless adoption, and it sparks a lot of interest. It is beneficial to highlight the possible cloud spending economies that can be achieved by using serverless during stakeholder interactions. To make the message stick, staying at a high level and not delving into more minor details is essential. For example, if you’re discussing the execution of a few Lambda functions to perform some business logic, stay at the level of the number of invocations per month and the expected overall cost; don’t split it into invocation costs, compute costs, etc.
An important aspect of serverless is the reduction in the amount of time spent on managing the infrastructure. This unique advantage should be brought up during conversations with stakeholders and explained in an understandable manner. Though applications built with serverless technology still require operational activities, ser‐ verless frees engineers from infrastructure and platform heavy lifting, thus saving considerable engineering time.
Discuss the convenience of serverless as a technology
Though lower cloud costs is a key driver for serverless, you must illustrate its other benefits to the business stakeholders as well. Solutions built for the modern consumer world have many demands. For example:
- Applications are expected to be highly secure and withstand brutal cyberattacks.
- Companies are pressured to comply with regulatory policies to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data.
- Customer demands constantly fluctuate; keeping them engaged and serving them faster is crucial.
As technology evolves, it pulls the entire industry along with it, moving faster with each iteration. Organizations often get caught in this flywheel with little time to react. As a result:
- Businesses are looking for the easiest way to run their workloads.
- Stakeholders are looking for the fastest way to release a feature.
- Engineers are looking for the safest way to handle data.
- Customers are looking for the simplest way to purchase a product.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 shook every corner of our world. While many businesses went through hardship, some thrived even during those dark days as they quickly adapted to the world’s changing needs, making course corrections on a practically daily basis. For many of them, it was the convenience and flexibility of serverless that made the difference. According to a BBC survey, new company registrations in the UK actually increased during the COVID-19 lockdown period, as shown in Figure 2-9.
Figure 2-9. Statistics showing the increase in new business registrations during the COVID-19 lockdown period
Working from home, engineers were able to capitalize on the capabilities of cloud and serverless to launch new products and services and rapidly deliver them to consumers’ living rooms. Serverless technology enables anyone to build and operate global-scale applications from anywhere. Along with its cost benefits, you must bring the convenience of delivering solutions faster using serverless technology to the attention of business stakeholders.
