Cache Concepts: Why use a serverless managed service?

This lesson dives into five important advantages of using a serverless managed service: cost efficiency, elasticity, reduced operational overhead, faster dev and deployment, and high availability, security, and resiliency.

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Transcript

Whether your application architecture is serverless, server-based (also known as serverful), or as a blend of the two, it's important to understand the advantages of using a serverless managed service.

We will cover five of these advantages in this lesson: cost efficiency, elasticity, reduced operational overhead, faster development and deployment, and finally, high availability, security, and resiliency.

First up, let's talk about cost efficiency. With a serverless managed service, you usually only pay for the specific resources and services you consume rather than for pre-allocated resources you may or may not use. This can result in significant cost savings compared to traditional serverful infrastructure, as you are not paying for idle capacity.

Additionally, serverless managed services abstract away the ongoing need for infrastructure management and provisioning. You don't need to invest in and maintain the underlying infrastructure, reducing costs. This is beneficial for any size business, as you can take advantage of enterprise-level infrastructure and services without investing in expensive hardware or personnel.

This brings us to the second advantage, elasticity. This refers to the ability of the infrastructure or service to dynamically and automatically adjust its resources to meet the changing needs of your applications. This means that as your usage of the service increases or decreases, your application can automatically take advantage of resources when needed. When you're not using them, you're not being charged for them. This results in a highly efficient use of resources and a lower overall cost.

Next up is reduced operational overhead. With a serverless service, the service provider is responsible for the maintenance and management of the underlying infrastructure, freeing up developers to focus on writing code and adding features to their applications.

This can significantly reduce the workload for developers, as they no longer need to worry about server management, capacity planning, or infrastructure upgrades. It also reduces the need for specialized infrastructure personnel, as the service provider manages the underlying infrastructure and maintenance.

This leads me to our fourth key advantage, which is faster development and deployment. With serverless services, developers can take advantage of prebuilt, ready-to-use components, such as database, caching services, and messaging services - reducing the amount of custom code that needs to be written and maintained.

This can significantly speed up the development process and allow organizations to respond quickly to changing business needs and market conditions.

In addition, serverless architectures are designed to be highly flexible and modular, allowing for rapid iteration and experimentation. Developers can quickly test and deploy new features and functionality without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This can lead to faster time to market for new products and services and a more agile development process.

Finally, most serverless services are designed to be highly available, secure, and resilient by default. The service provider handles underlying infrastructure failures and replication, which is transparent to the user and their application, ensuring high uptime. Services usually handle securing the system top to bottom, from access and authentication to encryption and everything in between.

In addition, serverless managed services often provide automatic failover and disaster recovery capabilities. Ensuring that the application remains available and responsive even in the event of a hardware failure or other disruptions. This can help organizations to meet their SLAs and ensure a positive user experience. Even in the face of unexpected interruptions.

In summary, employing serverless managed services brings several major benefits to your application development and production cycles that should not be overlooked. You get lower costs, faster development cycles, zero infrastructure management, security, and high availability - all things everyone needs to be successful. One big thing to remember is that serverless services are a positive, whether your application is serverless or not. It's an API call for a key piece of functionality that is battle-ready at a moment's notice.