No Servers Beyond this Point
By: Tribalscale Inc.
Tags: Serverless, AWS, Customer, Applications Development, Serverless Architecture

No Servers Beyond this Point

What is serverless architecture and when should it be used?

Major League Baseball (MLB) has a branch dedicated to the league’s internet and interactive media — Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). The MLBAM is improving the audience experience with a real-time player tracking system. This system displays player insights in real-time.

Designing this system meant considering the following factors:

· There are 30 MLB teams

· Each team has a 25-player active roster

· Each team has a 40-player expanded roster

· Teams play 162 games during the season

· The number of games played per day ranges from one to 15

· The entire MLB season lasts six months

The most significant factor was the length of the season — the real-time system would only be used six months of the year.

The MLBAM decided on a serverless architecture. They built it using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda service as the backbone of the system. It could scale up to handle 15-game days and scaled back for those days with only one or two games scheduled — always delivering analyzed player data in less than 20 seconds. When the season ends, so does the computing system. No more processing means no costs, no maintenance, and no upgrades needed during the off-season.

Lower cost, little maintenance, and always the newest, fastest technology. Using any other architecture would have resulted in a waste of money and time. The MLBAM system was a perfect fit for a serverless architecture.

Image by sendi gibran

Serverless Architecture

Quick intro to serverless architecture. It’s often referred to as just serverless —and that doesn’t mean server-free. Servers still run your applications. You select a service provider that takes care of all the provisioning, managing, scaling, and availability of the servers; letting you focus on the logic and coding.

In a serverless architecture, you do what you do best — design, write, and optimize code. You deploy your code when you’re ready. You don’t care where or how. You just know your code is running and doing its job.

When Should Serverless be Used?

Most of the advantages of serverless were pointed out in the MLBAM case study above — cost control, lower maintenance, scalability, availability, and the ability to focus on the code. The main disadvantage is a dependence on a third-party service vendor. Many don’t consider this a real disadvantage since you would still have vendor dependencies if you managed the servers.

When determining if a serverless architecture is right for your application go ahead and ask yourself the following:

· Do I need to have servers up and running 24-hours a day?

· Is my application a group of or even a single function?

· Can most of my application work be done on the client device?

· Will my application have a high volume of traffic and also times with little to no usage?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions serverless would likely work for you.

In a June 2020 post on the Forbes Technology Council blog, Romi Stein, a Forbes Councils Member, gave two reasons why a business today should strongly consider using a serverless architecture.

“Customer behaviour is changing. It’s difficult to make long-term investments when customer behaviour is rapidly changing. In a time of flux, serverless offers the ability to automatically scale to need.”

“Businesses must focus on core capabilities. By moving the burden of provisioning and managing the run-time environment to the function cloud, serverless unlocks teams’ capability to focus on what they do best: delivering innovative customer experiences.” (1)

Serverless architecture is a powerful solution if your needs align with its advantages. Knowing that your server costs will align with the demands placed on your software provides a less stressful, manageable, more profitable experience. You no longer need to be concerned with keeping your servers updated and system software upgraded. When technology changes, you will reap the benefits without having to purchase new equipment or monitoring tools.

Serverless is the right solution for businesses building applications for the Internet. Targeted functionality with the ability to scale in times of high demand, and shrink when usage is low, is one reason serverless has become a popular choice. Only pay for what you use. What successful business doesn’t want to experience high customer usage, lower costs, minimal maintenance, and real-time performance levels? A serverless architecture provides all of these and more.