Cloud computing news #10: Serverless, next-level cloud tech

This week we focus on serverless computing which continues to grow and enables agility, speed of innovation and lower cost to organizations.

Serverless Computing Spurs Business Innovation

According to Digitalist Magazine, serverless computing is outpacing conventional patterns of emerging technology adoption. Organizations across the globe see technology-driven innovation as essential to compete. Serverless computing promises to enable faster innovation at a lower cost and simplify the creation of responsive business processes. But what does “serverless computing” mean and how can companies benefit from it?

1. Innovate faster and at a lower cost: Serverless cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider acts as the server, dynamically managing the allocation of machine resources. This means that developers are able to focus on coding instead of managing deployment and runtime environments. Also, pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. Thus, with serverless computing, an organization can innovate faster and at a lower cost. Serverless computing eliminates the risk and cost of overprovisioning, as it can scale resources dynamically with no up-front capacity planning required.
2. Enable responsive business processes: Serverless function services – function as a service (FaaS) – can automatically activate and run application logic that carry out simple tasks in response to specific events. If the task enchained by an incoming event involves data management, developers can leverage serverless backends as a service (BaaS) for data caching, persistence, and analytics services via standard APIs. With this event-driven application infrastructure in place, one organization can decide at any moment to execute a new task in response to a given event.

Organizations also need the flexibility to develop and deploy their innovations where it makes the most sense for their business. Platforms that rely on open standards, deploy on all the major hyperscale public clouds, and offer portability between the hyperscaler IaaS foundations are really the ideal choice for serverless environments. Read more in Digitalist Magazine

Nordcloud tech blog: Developing serverless cloud components

A cloud component contains both your code and the necessary platform configuration to run it. The concept is similar to Docker containers, but here it is applied to serverless applications. Instead of wrapping an entire server in a container, a cloud component tells the cloud platform what services it depends on. A typical cloud component might include a REST API, a database table and the code needed to implement the related business logic. When you deploy the component, the necessary database services and API services are automatically provisioned in the cloud. Developers can assemble cloud applications from cloud components. This resembles the way they would compose traditional applications from software modules. The benefit is less repeated work to implement the same features in every project over and over again. Check out our tech blog that takes a look at some new technologies for developing cloud components

Nordcloud Case study: Developing on AWS services using a serverless architecture for Kemppi 

Nordcloud helped Kemppi build the initial architecture based on AWS IoT Core, API Gateway, Lambda and other AWS services. We also designed and developed the initial Angular.js based user interface for the solution. Developing on AWS services using a serverless architecture enabled Kemppi to develop the solution in half the time and cost compared to traditional, infrastucture based architectures. The serverless expertise of Nordcloud was key to enable a seamless rampup of development capabilities in the Kemppi development teams. Read more on our case study here

Serverless at Nordcloud

Nordcloud has a long track record with serverless, being among the first companies to adopt services such as AWS Lambda and API gateway for production projects already in 2015. Since then, Nordcloud has executed over 20 customer projects using serverless technologies for several use case such as web applications, IoT solutions, data platforms and cloud infrastructure monitoring or automation.

Nordcloud is an AWS Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB parter, a Serverless framework partner and contributor to the serverless community via contribution to open source projects, events and initiatives such as the Serverless Finland meetup.

How can we help you take your business to the next level with serverless?