Since 2014 when AWS launched AWS Lambda and kickstarted the serverless movement, going serverless has grown exponentially for organizations of all sizes from one-man start-ups to huge listed global enterprises. While there are some challenges to this new architecture, the ways moving to serverless can transform a business often far outweigh these.

Before looking at the use cases for serverless, let’s start from the basics and define what it actually means. While obvious, it’s important to clarify that there are still servers and data centers involved, however, they are now managed for you. Cloud providers, like AWS, offer managed off-the-shelf services on their own servers, both of which they are responsible for in terms of security, provisioning, updates and everything else you were previously responsible for on-prem servers.

With this in mind, a good way to think of serverless is “pay-per-use computing”, i.e. when you’re not using it, there are no costs. It’s then down to you - the user - to be responsible for the code, what you put into the managed services, and how you use them. It is also your code that stitches the chosen managed services together to create your unique application; the possibilities are endless.

Below are a few of the best use cases for going serverless. This is by no means an exhaustive list as the opportunities and solutions really can be endless, however, the examples below offer some of the most popular and most common reasons serverless architecture is being adopted. You might also want to check out our case study on going serverless based on Shamrock Trading Corp example.

Use Cases:

**Building Restful APIs **

One of the most popular use cases for going serverless is the ease at which to build RESTful APIs. Within AWS, Lambda functions alongside API Gateway provide a seamless way in which to create a scalable endpoint that processes data in real-time. Its ability to scale and fluctuate as demand changes without the need to maintain the servers it sits on is, understandably, a developer’s dream come true.

Being able to configure service integrations with API Gateway, AWS has made it simpler to implement asynchronous processing and, helpfully, reduces the need for additional Lambda functions.

Websockets

We are in an age where real-time two-way communication, such as live chat functionality, is not only more common but increasingly expected by customers and users. Websockets are perfect to enable this capability or in fact any time you’re needing communication of data between the user’s interface and a server.

Again, looking at AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda, connections between the user and server can be created and maintained with only a Lambda function being triggered when the user sends a message. This avoids the need to continuously poll the server for a reply reducing uptime.

#serverless