As the software world is constantly evolving, development practices are also expected to change and adapt to new challenges. With growing competition and increased customer expectations, there is a need to drive the speed of development all the while maintaining reassuring reliability against defects. DevOps is thus the solution to enhance the speed of development in an efficient and reliable way.

Adopting DevOps can however be a challenge, as it involves adjusting practices and implementing new infrastructures. Not every company has the time and resources to carry this out. Yet, serverless provides a new solution to tackle DevOps and promote its adoption.

What is Serverless?

Serverless computing is a method of providing backend services on an as-used basis. Servers are still used, but pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application instead of on a fixed amount of bandwidth or number of servers. In that way, Serverless can implement changes at a lower cost and better results.

Adopting DevOps has the purpose to speed up development while gaining better customer experience and quicker maturity of the product in terms of features, capabilities, and sustainability. The reluctance to adopt DevOps rests on the fact that it can be too expensive regarding the time and resources to implement as well as learning the processes and skills. That is where Serverless tools come into play.

How is Serverless beneficial to DevOps?

One of the greatest benefits of serverless technologies is that they provide a pay-as-you-go model, enabling businesses to only pay for the resources used. With AWS Lambda, for instance, users pay based on the number and duration of invocations, thus, lowering the costs.  Serverless computing hence provides runtimes to execute code, which is also known as Function as a service (FaaS) platforms. There could be cases where FaaS can become more expensive than containers depending on the traffic experience. However, in the case of FaaS for DevOps, the traffic concurs with the speed of development, making it lower than the required traffic in FaaS functions and thus, lowering the cost.

Moreover, serverless technology is auto-scalable and fully managed. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) tools are used to build, test, and deploy code and this is often done by using build automation. Hence, having tools with fast resolution of errors and bugs is crucial. In addition, fully-managed Docker containers as a service are also evolving. For instance, technologies such as AWS Fargate allow to operate these Docker containers and scale them without needing to provision and manage any underlying infrastructure. This is beneficial for DevOps since the containers can also be used to build, test, and deploy applications.

Therefore, it allows teams to not waste time on maintaining the DevOps architecture but to focus on the business logic that the DevOps infrastructure was actually built for.

There is also a trend towards implementing DevOps using serverless architectures. This approach is popular due to its ability to adopt unique and efficient CI/CD modeled to the application requirements, consumption-based cost models, and supportive services. By using serverless technologies, it is then possible to implement an entire build, test, and deploy pipeline by writing the code using serverless services, without using any hosted solutions.

Conclusion

Implementing DevOps is challenging but serverless makes it easier!

With its pay-as-you-go, auto-scalability, and fully managed services, Serverless allows a more efficient and cost-effective adoption of DevOps infrastructures. Serverless technologies can be used in the DevOps stack from development and testing to CI/CD and incident management, all the while running at a favorable cost and being greatly efficient in the speed of development and the reliability of the codes.