Four reasons to think Outside the Container

Microservices architecture promised unprecedented scalability in application development but with the advancement of edge computing, it became evident that microservices aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of scalability in enterprise architecture. There is still a lot of dead weight replicated across containers viz the libraries and boilerplate code. This gave birth to new construct - Serverless computing (also known as Function-as-a-Service) - Event driven application design and deployment paradigm where all the computing resources are provided as scalable cloud services.

Here are the key reasons, organizations need to take advantage of serverless computing:

1. Reduction in Costs - Unlike traditional cloud computing, clients need to pay for the services or instances used. No charges for downtime and idle time. It has been observed that drop in infrastructure cost can range from 50%-90%.
2. Flexible Scaling - Infrastructure recreates copies of function and scales to meet the demand thereby relieving developers of the overhead of resource allocation. It also greatly enhances your organization’s ability to react to the inevitable and unforeseeable changes.
3. Automated high availability - One less job for the architects and developers as serverless applications have built-in availability and fault tolerance. Needless to say, it will also reduce the time to market because there is no need to setup servers and configure environments.
4. Transparent execution -  Code is executed only in response to a well-defined business event, thereby increasing the transparency and reliability of the application to handle very specific business events or anomalies.

Finally, this bright shiny concept does make application performance tradeoffs for flexibility. Also, it makes the monitoring and debugging complicated as containers are abstracted from the application developers.

Almost all cloud providers now offer serverless capabilities for their cloud customers. Check out IBM Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Function and AWS Lambda. Interested in implementation of serverless computing, there are tons. Here is one of the most common use case.