The Pros and Cons of a Serverless DevOps Solution

The dream of any Product Owner is fully customizable production software without the expense of paying for the hardware it rests upon. While the cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) partially deliver on this promise, a completely serverless infrastructure would be much closer to this dream. From a Product Owner’s perspective, the possibility of deploying a public-facing application without investing precious dollars and time on infrastructure is tantalizing.

While not completely free of infrastructure, serverless infrastructure significantly reduces overhead costs by abstracting away physical hosting, physical security, server maintenance, and OS patching. Additionally, the flexibility of a serverless implementation is much greater than physical infrastructure, or even IaaS, as you pay only for what you use — at hundred-millisecond increments, on some platforms.

So, what exactly is serverless infrastructure? The answer varies slightly from provider to provider, but here is a short explanation. “Serverless” does not mean the absence of servers; it refers to the fact that the application owner does not need to know much about the underlying servers their software is running on. The serverless infrastructure provider abstracts away all the details about the infrastructure so your team can focus its efforts solely on delivery of new functionality instead of server maintenance.

For instance, a typical static web server is replaced by a blob hosting service, a database instance is replaced by a hosting providers database service, user management is handled by the provider’s single sign-on (SSO) and login solution, etc. All your DevOps team has to do is upload your application and content.

You do not need to worry about server patches, upgrading environments, reboots, adding additional resources to handle more load, spinning up additional needed services, or dealing with hardware failures.

Serverless infrastructure also gives us other technical and business advantages. First, you don’t need to hire twenty-four-hour on-call operations support just to keep the infrastructure running. This shrinks your technology footprint, meaning you can focus more resources on delivery and your DevOps team.

Serverless infrastructure does not eliminate the need for security experts, but it does allow you to trust your cloud provider for a large portion of your security needs. The cloud provider filling this role lets you hire only what you need to secure your application code and configure the cloud services properly.