The benefits of cloud computing and serverless technology

Leaders make one common mistake when it comes to serverless and cloud computing: They want to migrate their current environment exactly as it is to the cloud. That’s like planning a flight route based on the road network and street-level traffic. You can do it, but it’ll limit the impact of your efforts. 

There are times when a lift and shift migration to the cloud makes sense. But maintaining a lift and shift mindset can prevent you from making the most of cloud computing and serverless technology. Here’s how challenging the traditional way of thinking lets you reap the full benefits of cloud.

Cloud computing refers to accessing and using computing services on demand over the internet (the cloud) rather than physical data centers and storage. 

Serverless computing is a category of cloud computing that lets developers create software without managing infrastructure. It increases productivity, speeds up product delivery, optimizes resources, and keeps developers focused on the end product rather than infrastructure maintenance.

Once deployed, serverless apps respond to demand, scaling up or down as needed. They typically follow a pay-as-you-go pricing model—when a serverless function sits idle, it costs nothing.

Cloud computing and serverless frameworks have many advantages, but shifting to the cloud doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get value from it. If you want to reap these benefits, you’ll need a cloud transformation strategy.

Cloud providers take on some level of liability depending on where you are in your cloud journey.

Let’s say your organization hosts some virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud and uses autoscaling to spin them up or down. If you’ve misconfigured the autoscaling, you’re liable for the consequences. 

But once you take on serverless functions and adopt services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions, it becomes the cloud provider’s responsibility to manage these cloud resources. If they scale too high or too low, they bear the responsibility and costs, not you.

This allows your organization to become more agile and take full advantage of the cloud’s scalability. 

Organizations that use traditional data centers need to secure everything. In the cloud, cloud providers operate under a shared responsibility model. This means that your organization and your cloud provider share the responsibility of cloud security. 

In general, cloud providers are responsible for securing the cloud (the hardware, software, and infrastructure that runs their cloud services). Your organization is responsible for securing the data and applications within the cloud along with identity and access management (IAM), network security, and encryption.

The shared responsibility model can reduce some of the security burden and simplify compliance—so long as teams understand what cloud security elements they’re responsible for. This varies depending on the cloud provider and services you use.

Explore the five pillars of cloud security.

By far, the benefit leaders are most excited about is cost control and increased ROI. Because cloud uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, you pay only for the computing resources you use.

But cloud’s real ROI potential lies beyond the pricing model. The number one way to increase ROI with serverless frameworks and cloud computing is to avoid building anything from scratch. And if you do need to build something, there's often a way to shift some of the burden from your team. 

Serverless technology allows development teams to hand off as much work as they can to cloud platforms like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 

You wouldn’t buy a field, till it, plant wheat, water it, harvest the wheat, thresh it into flour, and bake bread to make a piece of toast. In the same way, you don’t need to write your own code when the building blocks already exist in your cloud platform. 

One example is Azure’s Durable Functions. This feature manages stateful workflows so your team doesn’t need to explicitly create, store, and retrieve the progress through your data’s workflow somewhere else. This process is so common that the cloud providers made it available without needing us to write lines of code. It’s like instant toast delivered to your door!

The more your team can leverage already-made code, the more time they get back on their schedules—and the more money goes back in your budget.

To see true success with cloud migration, your organization needs a cloud strategy that takes into account multicloud, cloud security, and cloud training. Build your cloud strategy with insights from cloud leaders.