The sharing economy has delivered dominant business models that have swept through a number of industries, such as taxi services and hotel accommodations, providing these items on a short-term, temporary basis. It's fitting, then, that IT services also are seeing their own version of a "sharing economy" business model, with applications and systems also delivered on a short-term, temporary basis -- the essence of serverless computing.
To better understand the implications of serverless computing for today's enterprise architecture, we heard from Marc Feghali, co-founder and VP of product management for Attivo Networks[1].
Q: How does a serverless architecture differ from a traditional IT architecture -- whether on-premises or already cloud-based?
Feghali: Traditional IT architectures use a server infrastructure, whether on-premises or cloud-based, that requires managing the systems and services required for an application to function. The application must always be running, and the organization must spin up other instances of the application to handle more load which tends to be resource-intensive. Serverless architecture focuses instead on having the infrastructure provided by a third party, with the organization only providing the code for the applications broken down into functions that are hosted by the third party. This allows the application to scale based on function usage and is more cost-effective since the third-party charges for how often the application uses the function, instead of having the application running all the time.
Q: How should the existing or legacy architecture be phased out? Is it an instant cut over, or do you recommend a more gradual migration?
There are specific use cases that will still require existing legacy architecture, but where practical a serverless infrastructure can provide capabilities for those that don't. Serverless computing is