For IBM, supporting the Serverless Architectures event of the Cloud Architect Alliance, was a logical occasion. Not only does it have its own serverless proposition, but, fueled by the legendary mantra Think, ‘Big Blue’ is also keen to learn something new everyday.
Henk Waanders, Technical Enablement Specialist at IBM: “At IBM, we think ’serverless’ is an important direction to take, as we are on par with the likes of AWS and Azure”, he said in this blog.
The IBM Cloud Functions platform was developed as a polyglot Function-as-a-Service programming platform within IBM and then donated to the open source community as Apache OpenWhisk.
Waanders saw three main advantages of serverless architectures really stand out:
Cost savings
With being serverless, you only use the compute power when you need it. “We saw savings up to 10 percent from the original sum. So the small overhead to set up a serverless architecture is worth it.”
Scalability
“Serverless is easy to realize because every request has its own instance. The old way: servers are created with a certain number of people logging on in mind. That’s how they get sized. Now, you only have to size for one person, and put them next to each other. So a serverless infrastructure is massively scalable.”
“But”, Waanders continues, “you must always keep in mind how fast you can enable this. For instance: what kind of rate limit does your provider have?”
Ease of integration
“Serverless computing also is a great match with microservices”, said Waanders. “You can easily integrate someone else’s function or new functions. Eventually we will move towards ‘infrastructure as a code’.”
Meetup
IBM Netherlands is supporting the exploration of the serverless topic even more. It will be organizing a meetup about ‘serverless’ themselves, at the beginning of next year. Contact Henk Waanders to stay up to date!