WHITE PAPER

Serverless Computing:
A Compelling
Opportunity
for Today’s Digital
Enterprise

Abstract
Cloud computing has enabled organizations to
focus less on their IT infrastructure and more on
their core products and services. In fact, the
cloud is no longer viewed as an alternative to
hosting infrastructure: In today’s world, all kinds
of businesses are using cloud services without
having to worry about any underlying
infrastructure issues.

This new consumption model has evolved to

serverless architecture. By adopting serverless
architectures, customers can re-imagine their
next-generation products from ideation to
production, without waiting for, or worrying
about, infrastructure. The benets are signicant,
generating efciencies, lowering costs, and
speeding time to market.
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An evolution of the cloud

The serverless cloud is an evolutionary step in leveraging the
cloud to its full potential. In a serverless environment, your
applications still run on servers, but you don’t have to own,
manage, or maintain those servers. You simply consume
computing infrastructure in the same way that you consume
other cloud services. The cloud service provider (CSP) is
responsible for underlying infrastructure management, freeing
your resources to focus on your core business functions.

Two key drivers

Advances in computing technology have enabled the serverless
environment, and enterprises are embracing it because of two
key drivers:

New business models: The digital era has greatly accelerated

the pace of change and evolution for new products, services,
and business models. Market dynamics are changing faster than
ever before. Enterprises are under increasing pressure to
release new features and products that meet the exponentially
growing expectations of customers. Digital reimagination and
the Internet of Things are affecting every industry.

This new environment makes the idea of serverless architecture

more attractive than ever before. It effectively eliminates the
time-consuming and expensive traditional approach: building
components in-house, purchasing new hardware, installing
servers, conguring, and troubleshooting.

A paradigm shift in the organizational mindset: DevOps

and the agile development culture are driving organizations to
fundamentally change the way they develop business
applications. Monolithic applications are giving way to micro
services, API, and function-based execution units. The trend of
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI-CD) is
helping IT match pace with business agility. The long cycles of
change management and waterfall execution models are giving
way to weekly or bi-weekly sprints of smaller scrum teams
pushing new code changes.

For many enterprises, the big questions today are these:

n How can my infrastructure support this agile approach

characterized by frequent but small changes?

n How can we provide developers and operations teams with

an infrastructure that can self-manage, scale on demand, and
provide the compute and storage capacity needed to grow?
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These trends have fundamentally changed the way enterprises

approach infrastructure. The cloud has enabled organizations to
build their own enterprise-grade infrastructure at commodity
cost. Nonetheless, whether servers reside on premise or in
cloud, you still need to invest in creating, maintaining, and
managing the infrastructure to ensure high availability,
scalability, and elasticity. For enterprise developers, the resulting
dependency on infrastructure in the cloud makes the
development and release process slow.

Serverless architecture characteristics

The solution is the serverless architecture. With this approach,
you don’t have to purchase, rent, or provision servers or virtual
machines to run your code (see Figure 1). Serverless
architectures are dened by these features:

n Built using services (not servers or virtual machines)

provided by CSP and fully managed by the CSP

n Services that support elasticity and fault tolerance while

providing enterprise-level global security

n Automatic scaling

n Built-in high availability

n Integrated security

n Event-driven compute to execute business logic (examples

include AWS Lambda, Azure functions, IBM Bluemix
OpenWhisk, Google Cloud Functions

n Pay-as-you go fee structure (for consumed services only)

n Developer-productivity centric

n Promotes continuous build, integration, and deployment

efforts

n Innovation by focusing on developing and deploying business

functionality

n Reduced time to market

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Traditional laaS Severless Serverless+Microservices

Application Release Application Release Function Release to Production
to Production to Production F1 F2 F3 F4

Core Business Core Business B1 B2 B3 B4

You Managed
You Managed
Application Application A1 A2 A3 A4
You Managed

Data Data D1 D2 D3 D4

Runtime Runtime R1 R3 R4
R2

Middleware Middleware Middleware

Operating System Operating System

CSP Managed

CSP Managed
Operating System

Virtualization Virtualization
CSP Managed

Virtualization

Server Server Server

Storage Storage Storage

Networking Networking Networking

CLOUD SERVICES REIMAGINED LEGO MODEL OF SERVICES

CSP: Cloud Service Provider B#: Business Feature A#: Function for B#
D#: Data for B# R#: Runtime for A# F#: Software Release for B#

Serverless Architecture Building Blocks

Use cases for serverless

When should you choose a serverless architecture over a
server-based one? There are no specic rules, but examining
the following attributes and use case possibilities can help you
come to the right decision:

n Data in terms of variety (structured vs unstructured),

volume, and variability

n Security requirements: Legal, regulatory, compliance,

encryption, tokenization

n Management control: Governance and reporting

n Licensing: Third-party products, license extensibility

n Portability/Lock-ins: Ability to bring software components in

house to port to different CSP, lock-ins

n Geographical restrictions: Serverless components may not be

available in all geographies

n Integrations: Number and complexity of integrations with on-

premise systems, other cloud services, and SaaS
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n Feasibility of redesigning components and time to market

n Resource availability and skill sets

n Cost of hosting infrastructure in cloud versus cost of running

business function

Serverless architectures can be useful in several situations:

n Web/Mobile applications

n Streaming and telematics solutions

n IoT solutions

n Advanced analytics and articial intelligence solutions

n Cloud automation and DevOps enablement

Before making an architectural decision, it’s critical to make a

thorough evaluation of the attributes and use cases.

The benets of going serverless

Reduce costs: Like cloud services, serverless is a new way of
ofoading IT overhead. A serverless architecture eliminates the
responsibility of managing servers, databases, and even
application logic, reducing set-up and maintenance costs. You
only pay for the time your code executes, reducing operational
costs. Serverless architecture lowers cloud administration cost
(cloud server management and associated people costs).

Rapid development and deployment: Serverless

architectures are built to enhance developer productivity and to
make build, test and release cycles inherently agile. With the
serverless approach, you can do as many test runs as you like
without having to worry about when your infrastructure will be
ready or when other components in the solution will be available
for rollout. Cloud service providers are also investing to
standardize development environments to encourage use of
serverless architectures (such as the 2016 announcement of
AWS Lambda supporting C#).

Reduced time to market: By using a serverless architecture,

you can transform ideas into reality in a matter of minutes or
hours. Serverless architectures also enable running multiple
versions of code to meet tight deadlines.

For example: To develop a functionality that returns credit score

for mobile users as part of your mobile banking app, a
traditional cloud IaaS model (such as AWS EC2) could requires
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days or even a week for developing, testing, and delivering the

functionality. Using AWS Lambda (serverless, event-driven
computing) you can develop the same functionality in matter of
few hours. It takes just a few clicks to provision serverless
services with scaling, fault tolerance, and elasticity all built in.

Built-In scaling: Like cloud services, serverless offerings have

built-in scalability. There’s no need for guesswork when it comes
to scaling policies or over-/under-provisioning concerns. Just
pay for the service usage, and the serverless architecture
infrastructure will grow or shrink based on demand.

Failover: Disaster recovery is integrated into CSP offerings.

Because serverless components are based on the pay-per-use
model, setting up failover infrastructure in paired regions of a
given geography comes at fraction of the cost of the traditional
server-based architecture. The additional benet is bringing the
recovery time (RTO) down to near zero, making seamless
switchover a possibility at fractional cost of existing setups.

The risks of going serverless

Loss of control over infrastructure: The cloud service
provider controls the underlying infrastructure, so you will not
be able to customize/optimize the infrastructure to suit specic
needs. CSP-established service limits for serverless components
may challenge the applicability for your use case. Multiple
customers sharing the same serverless architecture may raise
security concerns. CSPs are addressing these concerns by
allowing customer to use serverless offerings in a virtual private
network.

Lock-In: Switching from one vendor’s serverless offering to

another’s may require signicant time and efforts. (TCS Digital
Enterprise offers frameworks and professional services to help
customers choose the right set of serverless components and
make cloud portability a possibility.)

Compliance concerns: CSPs are responsible for doing

vulnerability scanning and penetration tests on infrastructure
underlying serverless offerings. But as a consumer of serverless
offerings, you cannot do these tests. For example, you cannot
perform penetration test on underlying infrastructure for your
AWS Lambda function. For most customers this may not be an
issue but if your use case requires you to perform penetration
tests on infrastructure for compliance, legal reasons you may
prefer a more traditional, server-based approach.
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Monitoring, logging and debugging: Monitoring, logging and

debugging of serverless architecture may often need customized
code and/or third-party software adding more costs.

Conclusion
Adopting serverless can deliver many benets—but the road to
serverless can get challenging depending on the use case. And
like any new technology innovations, serverless architectures
will evolve en route to becoming a well-established obvious
standard. While serverless architecture may not be a solution to
every IT problem, it surely represents the future of many kinds
of computing solutions in the coming years.
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About The Authors

Sameer Limaye

and

Asif Khan

Contact

Visit TCS’ Digital Enterprise unit page for more information

Email: [email protected]

Blog: Digital Reimagination

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