DevOps took the world by a huge surprise when it showed the ability to combine the release practices, tools, and cultural mindsets to increase the capabilities, and deliver applications faster and better ✅ The speed helps companies to better serve their customers with better quality products, that get updated as per market demands.
With more focus on teams working on the front-end now, serverless is the chosen framework by many organizations as it helps in releasing patches and code at a much faster rate. The entire infrastructure task can be automated. This requires a thorough learning mindset which is a tough job, but the results are worth the effort.
What Does Serverless Mean?
Rather than having teams who take care of all aspects of product development and deliveries, organizations these days have opted to outsource the infrastructure and its management to external vendors.
This helps their teams to focus on the core functionalities of their product whereas the vendor takes care of releases, patches, and deployments. All the pipelines and merging decisions are taken by them, designed by them, and maintained by them.
Why Should We Opt For Serverless?
You might already be using DevOps in your project. If not, then you are still not at a loss as you can adopt a serverless approach at any time, considering its pros and cons and looking at your requirements 💡 The DevOps works on pipelines, ranging from simple to complex.
If you adopt the serverless framework, your teams become free from maintaining and managing the pipelines. If you’re starting new in DevOps and believe in serverless capabilities, let a third party handle the serverless parts and instead focus on the development. Both the code and the infrastructure will develop in quality.
Often people talk about automation in the serverless framework. It is easy to manage and implement, however, a lot of analysis needs to be in place to ensure the pipeline works smoothly and efficiently. Developers will pass on their code to correct pipes and the automation scripts will control the pipes and the movement to deployment.
The only downside is that it doesn’t guarantee a lot of visibility for your internal teams. There are dashboards built that help monitor, but that’s a surface view and not an in-depth view. Let’s see the benefits in the following table:
| Benefits of Serverless | |
| Production deployments are better managed | The user no longer has to manage the infrastructure. The operations are managed by third parties who are dedicated to managing production deployments. |
| Patches get deployed very quickly | Code gets run on demand to install any new patch. All it requires is to generate a new request, trigger the code and it starts executing. |
| Productivity increase | Since this is managed by a third party, the rest of the team can focus on more front-end and back-end tasks. The productivity shoots up. |
Which Serverless Service Should I Select?
There are many services if you want to go the serverless way. However, the most popular ones are the following:
1️⃣ Google Cloud
It is offered as a Function as a Service (FaaS). It can only be used in the cloud, so that is something you need to take care of. It offers:
- Logging features
- Debugging features
- Monitoring features
It also supports many environments like Kubernetes. People often use Google Cloud in the fields of Machine learning and real-time processes.
2️⃣ Azure
Microsoft’s most popular service is Azure. The functions are very easy to integrate here with Visual Studio. It offers:
- Building code features
- Testing code features
- Deploying features
Azure also offers Logic Apps which is a service for creating visual design workflows and Event Grid which is a message routing service to integrate functions with other Azure services.
3️⃣ AWS Lambda
It is a service that uses APIs to connect to other AWS services. Provided by Amazon, it is quite popular with developers. It can connect to other applications but can run standalone as well. It provides ACW (Amazon Cloud Watch) to monitor services. It is used in the fields of machine learnings and data processing.
Conclusion
Moving your DevOps to serverless will mean you have enabled your team to eliminate time and cost on the back-end. Finding a correct serverless provider is challenging as each one has its own offerings and shortcomings. But once that is achieved as per your team’s needs, you will see the true benefits of it. So go serverless and take DevOps to the next levels 📈