Why Serverless September is worth tuning into
Microsoft has launched Serverless September, providing an extensive schedule of information on how to make the best use of this technology paradigm on the Azure platform.
What is Serverless September?
Microsoft describes Serverless September as: “A month-long celebration of serverless computing - from core concepts and developer tools, to usage scenarios and best practices. Bookmark this page, then join us September 1, 2022 as we kickstart multiple community-driven and self-guided learning initiatives for jumpstarting your Cloud Native journey.”
From discussing core concepts to hosting informative Q&A sessions, there’s lots of great content planned for the month. If you weren’t already planning on getting involved, then here’s why you should!
Accelerating delivery
While Serverless is still relatively new, it’s no longer an emerging, cutting-edge approach. Nowadays, Serverless has become the backbone of many global businesses, operating in secure environments at scale. If you aren’t considering it now, this is a great way to see some real usage scenarios and answer some questions around areas of Serverless that previously made you or your organisation cautious.
Serverless isn’t the answer to every problem - but for a significant number of types of IT systems, it is a great way to focus more of your time on delivering user value and less on IT plumbing. Redirecting your people’s time and mental energy to solving your customer problems will allow you to deliver better outcomes at greater speed.
Staff motivation and development
Technology moves fast. Whilst it’s a fantastic, innovative industry to work in – we are generally short on talent. The skills to critically look at and evaluate new technology, frameworks and approaches to decide which are worth further investment and which aren’t are incredibly important to anyone working in technology – but especially those in leadership roles.
Even if you aren’t planning to adopt Serverless in the short term, ensuring that you are keeping yourself and your organisation aware of the opportunity and making a conscious decision to invest or not, helps keep the skills to evaluate new things sharp. It also demonstrates a clear appetite to move forward at the right pace, rather than remaining stationary.
Up-to-date skills
Ensuring that your teams are equipped with up-to-date skills means that you don’t have to play catch up for knowledge or people whenever a technology change is required. Serverless can sometimes require a different mindset to some of the architectural and engineering approaches which have come before, therefore trying to upskill in a rush (when your hand is forced) is likely to lead to significant issues.
Building an early awareness of new approaches ensures that you can properly assess them; considering how they would serve your user needs better or how you could implement things differently, using tools which weren’t available the first time around.
Sustainability and FinOps enablement
Serverless, Sustainable development and FinOps are each great accelerators for one other - acting as force multipliers for the effectiveness and outputs the others bring. By ensuring that we use only the compute that we require and that we engineer systems that run efficiently, this leads to a reduced environmental impact (and with cloud provider commercial models, it also leads to a reduced IT spend).
Serverless is a key enabler in these areas, as it allows very granular levels of linking components and functions to the specific cost and compute requirements. While it can be hard to measure the specific impact of a redesign, a new component in a data centre, or even in a large container environment, we can understand exactly how much better or worse a particular implementation is in a serverless environment.
This helps us all make stronger, well-informed decisions about which features or optimisations to prioritise, as well as what it has cost to deliver a specific business outcome.
To summarise
Serverless continues to be an incredibly exciting space to work in. When understood and applied properly, Serverless provides significant benefits to almost all areas of a team or business. You can read more about Serverless September's full agenda here.
Serverless specialists
At Kainos, we help clients and teams deliver outcomes which are focussed on tangible user needs and the best application of technology. We are specialists in identifying the right use cases for Serverless and enabling teams to deliver at pace. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help with your Serverless journey, please get in touch.