Serverless Computing Benefits for DevOps: A BTS You Should Not Miss!

What’s a BTS? Not the famous Korean band! Yeah, it's about behind the scenes but not your favorite Hollywood flick! To understand which BTS I am talking about, let’s know serverless!

We already know that serverless does not mean eliminating servers. However, what makes the “less” part justifiable, is freedom from underlying infrastructure provisioning and management.

A serverless vendor takes care of theBTS of your application while you concentrate on the core product. Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg; there are many treasures like pay-as-you-use and scalability in the serverless ocean! And if you double up serverless with DevOps, it's a jackpot.

How is that?

The serverless approach enables DevOps teams to reduce time and effort spent on the backend. DevOps teams can use a serverless approach and leverage Infrastructure as Code(IAC). In addition, it allows teams to use declarative languages to manage workloads.

Apart from IaC, there are many benefits of serverless computing for DevOps. Both serverless and DevOps work as an interference fit. In other words, they are the best fit for each other!

So, let’s understand both the blocks individually first to know how they are fit well.

Block 1 Serverless

If you are great at balancing acts or juggling your infrastructure, you don’t need serverless.

However, if you are not that great at juggling, serverless vendors do that for you for the price of the services and infrastructure you use. So, you don’t need to pay for something sitting idle. Serverless is an event-based software design pattern that eliminates the need for provisioning servers, scaling them, and handling loads.

According to Martin Fowler, Serverless architecture are application designs with integrated third-party services and custom code running on managed containers. As a result, businesses can simply opt for third-party services that manage the underlying infrastructure without investing in physical servers.

The serverless approach helps in reducing the need for traditional always-on server component and introduce the on-off practice. So, you use containers to run codes and terminate them when not operational.

There are two serverless models,

• FaaS- Function as a Service(Ephemeral containers)
• BaaS- Backend as a Service(third-party backend services)

FaaS is a serverless model where applications run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered and may last only for a single invocation. The best part about FaaS is that you can create triggers for the invocation of compute containers.

**AWS Lambda is an example of one such service where you can create__lambda functions__. It is invoked through an event trigger to run specific code. For example, take an instance of the lambda function to monitor the temperature of servers.

If the temperature exceeds a predefined threshold, a JSON formatted document(event) is converted to an object and passed to function code. Then, the AWS service will invoke your function with pre-defined services to be executed, which can be an invocation of Amazon SNS notification.

Your serverless block is all set now! Next, it’s time to set up the next block.

Block 2 DevOps

DevOps name spills the beans on what it’s all about! “Dev” and “Ops” enable higher efficiency, flexibility, and faster time-to-market. It is a set of practices that enhances collaborations, provides operation synchronizations, and helps with rapid error resolution.

With DevOps, organizations can,

• Reduce time-to-market
• Achieve quicker iterations and release cycles
• Detect errors faster
• Improve collaboration between dev and ops team
• Monitor app performance for higher ROI

There are many benefits of DevOps, and you may be aware of some advantages. However, it's the challenges in DevOps adoption where serverless fits right in. DevOps adoption needs proper planning with consideration of different internal and external factors. Serverless is an approach that acts as a problem solver for DevOps teams, countering several external and internal aspects. Basically, “Problem Solved” or “Isn’t?”

Let’s discuss it!

Serverless for DevOps: The perfect fit!

DevOps breaks the monolith silos that development teams and operations teams are to convert them into more manageable units working cohesively. This might sound geeky, but it isn’t. Think of asking the football team to work cohesively with the Nascar team!

That can happen if you ask two siloed teams to work together straightaway without planning or tools required for collaboration. DevOps enables such partnership but with a twist of smaller interoperable units working in sprints.

It’s all hail-mary with DevOps, right?

Everything has two sides, and DevOps is no different. It has many challenges, including local debugging, provisioning issues, deployment bottlenecks, etc.

Local debugging

If you are debugging an application on your workstation, it is called local debugging. If you debug a system accessible by network connection, it is remote debugging. DevOps allows developers, testing teams, and QAs to work in a cohesive environment. However, one drawback is local debugging. Application testing and debugging are on the cloud, making local debugging complex. Remote debugging is one option, but it has underlying issues without a distributed architecture.

Serverless comes to the rescue by limiting access to execution environments. As a result, you don’t need to access servers to monitor application behavior. Instead, you can quickly execute the entire build, test, and deploy CI/CD pipeline with a glue code.

The result is an easily adjustable infrastructure. You can quickly deploy, test, and roll back any version with minimum downtime.

Provisioning with serverless

Imagine the DevOps team managing and provisioning across multiple cloud platforms. It takes a ton of effort to configure services and ensure smooth deployment across environments. Instead, you can use a serverless approach with tools like Terraform.

It makes infrastructure management easy through resource configuration. In other words, manual management of infrastructure is low with Terraform. So, DevOps teams can focus more on the product and less on infrastructure.

Deployment flexibility

Serverless offers immutability. Any change in the existing system results in a spun-up instance. Both these instances can run simultaneously. It means development and deployment teams can switch from one version to another without hassle.

Such flexibility helps in testing multiple versions and rolling back updates—all of these are without any interruption to the system.

The fit is ready!

A successful application needs a perfect fit of planning, tech-stack, design, and execution. Serverless fits perfectly with DevOps and provides the edge over your competitors. However, it depends on business-specific implementations. So, create your perfect market-fit by analyzing deployment problems, need flexibility, and infrastructure management.