By Parveen Mittal, Vice President & General Manager, Celigo
A cloud platform, also known as a cloud computing platform, refers to a set of software services and resources, like computing, storage and networking, provided through a remote data center by a service provider. Cloud platform enables organisations and individuals to build, deploy, and manage applications and data without the need for investing in physical infrastructure.
The popularity of cloud platforms has accelerated as organisations don’t have to worry about capital investment in setting up captive data centers and maintaining them. Now a company can take computing and storage capacity from a cloud provider as required and then increase or reduce it as per business needs. Cloud platforms offer unmatched scalability, cost savings, accessibility, reliability, security, and ease of use, making them a compelling choice for businesses and individuals seeking a flexible and efficient computing environment.
Cloud Platform growth
The cloud computing market has become highly competitive, with major players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others including many telecom services providers constantly innovating and expanding their offerings to capture market share. The global cloud platform market was valued at nearly $570 billion in 2022 & is projected to grow to around $2,430 billion by 2030.
This aggressive growth in Cloud Platforms is driven by massive digital transformation across all business domains, new business models taking advantage of the adoption of mobile data, Artificial intelligence, and Machine learning, requiring huge amounts of storage, networking, and computing capacity.
Cloud platforms have become even more useful and cost-effective with new capabilities like Serverless Computing that enable you to pay for computing capability only when you need it. This pay-as-you-go model of serverless computing has enabled large organisations to build niche services on Cloud while small companies are able to reduce their expenses while still getting all the benefits of the Cloud Platform.
Serverless Computing
Serverless computing, also known as Function as a Service (FaaS), is a cloud computing model in which the cloud provider manages the infrastructure and dynamically allocates resources to run individual functions or code as and when required based on an event or trigger. The term “serverless” does not mean there are no servers involved; rather, it implies that developers do not need to manage or worry about the servers’ underlying infrastructure. Many cloud platforms provide serverless computing, the popular ones being AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and also Cloud Functions from Google and Oracle.
Who needs Serverless Computing?
More than half the companies operating in the cloud use Serverless Computing like AWS Lambda to effectively manage their variable workloads. It is used by the Global 500 companies but it’s especially valuable to small businesses.
Say, a local bakery shop builds a simple e-commerce site to sell its goodies and serves 10-100 customers daily on average. Now even if this online shop is built on a cloud platform, it still has to rent computing and storage capacity. And this business processes online orders just a few times every day and that too during the daytime.
The owner of this business can save significant expenses and effectively handle changing workloads thanks to serverless computing’s ability to assign computing resources dynamically based on demand.
Key Benefits of Serverless Computing
1. Cost-Efficiency: Serverless computing’s pay-as-you-go pricing model helps you only pay for the actual compute resources used during the execution of functions, avoiding the need to maintain and pay for idle server capacity.
2. Reduced Infrastructure Management: It eliminates the need for businesses to manage and maintain servers. The cloud provider takes care of provisioning, scaling, and monitoring the infrastructure. You can then focus on your core business.
3. Scalability: Serverless platforms automatically scale based on demand. So if that bakery store gets a large number of orders in a wedding season, the application will automatically handle the increased traffic without requiring manual intervention. This capability is really useful in the business with experience unpredictable or fluctuating workloads.
4. Faster Development and Deployment: Developers can focus solely on writing code for specific functions without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. This allows for faster development cycles and quicker deployment of new features or applications.
5. Ease of Integration: Serverless platforms typically provide easy integration with other cloud services and APIs. Small businesses can leverage these integrations to build more feature-rich applications without having to develop everything from scratch.
6. Automatic High Availability: Serverless platforms often provide built-in high availability, ensuring that the application remains accessible even in the event of hardware failures. This level of reliability can be challenging for small businesses to achieve on their own.
7. Reduced Overhead: It reduces the need to hire dedicated IT staff to manage servers and infrastructure, which can be a significant cost-saving for small businesses with limited human resources.
How Serverless Computing supports Cloud Platform and Data Centers growth
Serverless Computing facilitates the adoption of the Cloud for large mature companies and lowers the entrance barrier for start-ups and small organizations, which may lack the resources or experience to run traditional server-based infrastructure. It has become a powerful force that is increasing cloud platform adoption and propelling the expansion of data centers. It has drawn organizations of all sizes to adopt cloud technologies by streamlining infrastructure administration and offering a financially viable scaling paradigm.
Without the requirement for physical data centers in every place and dedicated computing capacity for every small business need, corporates have been adopting the worldwide reach of cloud providers offering serverless platforms. Serverless computing’s resource optimization and energy-efficient methodology also support sustainable computing practices, helping businesses grow while helping them meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements.