In this article, we are going to dive into why serverless is a good investment for your company, regardless of whether you are a startup or a fortune 500 enterprise and why you should hire serverless consultants.

Serverless is near and dear to my heart as my day to day for the past few years has been as a serverless consultant and now the CEO of Serverless Guru the top serverless consulting company.

Serverless Guru primarily guides companies with serverless migration planning/implementation, pattern development which incorporates best practices, training on serverless development within their specific context, and downstream support for leadership and individual developers. I’ll talk more about this later.

Why Serverless

When it comes to building applications in 2020, there are a lot of options and all though I’m of the opinion you should always start with serverless.

Let’s first talk about your business. Let’s talk about what actually matters. As you’re aware, you can have a “world-class” system, but if no one buys your product then it will have zero impact on keeping your business from failing.

Different companies have different concerns, let’s highlight two:

1. Startups
2. Enterprise

Startups

As a startup, you need too:

• build quickly
• use resources efficiently
• keep costs to a minimum

Enterprise

As an enterprise, you need too:

• standardize across many teams and services
• build resiliency into your products
• scale to meet a proven user base

The best of both worlds 🌐

I’m here to tell you, that everything mentioned under “Startup” and everything mentioned under “Enterprise” are both equally possible with serverless.

In the past, we’ve often made sacrifices. Less speed, but more resilience. Less standardization, but faster delivery.

All of these past “trade-offs” can exist in harmony with each other and it’s not out of reach.

The days of needing a black-belt server guru are going away. The days of needing a staff of operations personnel to maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot infrastructure like right-sizing databases are going away.

Now we are in a new era. The era of serverless.

The era of serverless 🌩

Serverless can be a broad term, but let me boil it down to this. Serverless lets you focus on your product, what your customers actually see and what your customers actually care about.

Serverless removes overhead from traditional systems and abstracts them away into simple integrations.

The era of serverless is also the era of fully managed services.

Great companies do less, but better.

When we eliminate and avoid manual processes like the plague, we create self-documenting, long living systems which do not live and die with our black-belt server guru.

This doesn’t mean we need to replace our black-belt server guru, my opinion is that these individuals are the best suited to lead the serverless movement. Knowledge is not lost with the transition to serverless, but supercharged as these individuals will uniquely understand all the hidden layers.

A key difference with serverless is the protection of knowledge/insight into how our applications work through self-documenting infrastructure. In the past when the black-belt server guru left our companies, that knowledge of how to navigate in the darkness of the black box went with them. With serverless that knowledge will live on.

Black Box Development ⬛️

A black box is a server which was manually configured and riddled with unknowns.

As applications are developed, teams will spin up servers, ssh into them, download and modify the filesystem, load their application code, and run it.

The problem arises when months or years pass and then someone tries to jump into that server to figure out what the hell is going on and they realize they have no idea where to even start. And potentially no one else does either because there is no documentation and the person who built it left the company.

Black boxes are difficult to replicate and difficult to change.

This isn’t to say that all servers are black boxes. There are plenty of companies in existence that have created robust automation and tooling where they don’t have a black box issue.

But, it didn’t magically happen and it doesn’t magically continue to not happen. It takes a lot of engineering hours and due to the complexity. Each new team member has to learn how this robust infrastructure is configured, how to troubleshoot, and how to extend.

Serverless by design abstracts more of the underlying layers, meaning by default you will avoid a lot of this added complexity.

Note: It’s easy to take a narrow view on cloud costs and look only at raw cloud resource expenses. The more difficult calculation is TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and when TCO is considered, serverless is even more attractive.

Serverless, our salvation 📿

As we think about our existing systems that we may want to migrate or our ideas we want to see realized. We need to think about “how” we can make these aspirations a reality.

Serverless is our salvation. The way in which you build serverless applications is opinionated. That is ideal.

We want opinionated services that we can plug-n-play so we can keep the focus on providing value to our end users.

There are few core areas of serverless that our clients at Serverless Guru have seen the largest benefit from, let’s talk about it.

Serverless applications are self-documenting. When you create the underlying infrastructure for your serverless applications, by default you will be using IAC (Infrastructure as Code) which will be stored in a centralized code repository. Each line of IAC will outlive our “black-belt server guru” and can easily be copied and standardized.

Serverless applications are scalable. When you build serverless applications you are choosing to hand-off the responsibility of managing the underlying servers and scaling those servers to the cloud provider. This means that by default you can not only achieve vertical scaling, but also horizontal.

Serverless applications are efficient. When you develop a serverless application, you have less overhead. Meaning your team moves faster and they manage less, leading to more time spent on features that provide value to your end users.

Serverless applications are empowering. Gone are the days of the “black-belt server guru” with 15+ years of experience who has unbalanced level of control due to having a deep understanding of how the “black box” works. Serverless is an equalizer. It levels the playing field granting new developers a chance to make a larger impact while eliminating a lot of pre-requisites and barriers of entry. Additionally, for those with experience they are now supercharged with serverless.

Serverless applications are cost optimized. The 24/7 always on server is dead. It’s dead because of pay-per-use. It’s dead because of waste. No longer do we have to use a 24/7 always on server for our applications. We now get a choice, maybe it’s needed and maybe it isn’t, but now we have a choice.

Why hire serverless consultants?

Expertise with serverless takes time to build up. It’s not a light switch. Online resources will help, but may ultimately fall short due to lack of context.

Ultimately you have two options:

1. Slow
2. Fast

Slow

If you want to save money upstream by letting your development team take on serverless by themselves, then you are fine to do so. This is how I learned and how the serverless consultants at Serverless Guru learned as well.

This option can be good to build up internal expertise inside your team, but it’s not fast. It’s a slow process that can span multiple years of trial/error and learning the gaps in each service that your application requires.

The other downside is you can easily run the risk of building up that deep serverless knowledge with a few individuals inside your organization. Then lose them to better opportunities which means you invested hundreds of thousands for training, but didn’t retain the majority of it.

Fast

A lot of companies struggle to see the value in spending a large sum upfront or upstream to save downstream/unseen costs.

Nobody wants to buy insurance, until their house is on fire and by that point it’s too late.

I like this quote because it gets across a clear message. Don’t wait to see the bills pile up from a misguided approach, invest early and save downstream expenses.

We often see companies who choose to “go it alone” and they end up biting off more than they can chew with serverless. Instead, let me suggest an alternative.

If you want to do things right the first time, then you need to have a guide that will walk with you and your team as they take this plunge into serverless. A guide is someone who will understand your context, build a plan/strategy with patterns specific to that context, teach your team how to understand/extend, and either help execute that strategy across all services for you or provide ongoing support as your team executes on that plan.

Give them a fish and they’ll eat for a day. Teach them to fish and they’ll eat for a lifetime.

I love this quote and it holds true when you work with Serverless Guru. Regardless of whether you choose to have us execute on the plan we develop or you choose to have your team execute on the plan we develop.

Ultimately, everyone on your team will learn “how to catch fish” and at some point you will either stop needing our support or be so freed up that you’ll want to explore new areas and use us to help kick off those new initiatives.

When it comes to serverless consulting, there are a few options out there. We are probably one of the more expensive options, but still my #1 choice would be Serverless Guru (for good reason):

• FREE 90+ lesson serverless training course with 500+ students
• 70+ articles on serverless topics
• 50+ public serverless patterns
• and public documentation on various serverless topics

A key thing to point out above is that everything above is completely FREE.

A lot of companies talk about how they give back, but make sure to do your due diligence. Those listed resources above are evidence of not only our expertise at Serverless Guru, but also our commitment to give back everyday to the community as we service our clients.

Conclusion

Let’s close out by taking a step back.

In 2020, your first choice for developing software should be with serverless in mind. If you have an existing system, you should evaluate what can be moved to serverless and start planning.

If you’re thinking about starting on a serverless journey, find a quality guide.

If you’re an individual thinking about a career move that will rapidly expand into the future, think serverless.

And if you enjoyed this article and found it insightful in any way. Drop us some 👏 and if you want to find out more about Serverless Guru give us a follow on Twitter or send us a message directly.

‍