In 2008, Netflix was struck by a disaster. A fast-growing global streaming service was well on its way to transform the entertainment industry when the management faced a problem exposed by a data center failure. Even though it was a single issue, it shut the entire service down, depriving the company of millions in profits and effectively ending the shipments of DVDs (they were still a thing in 2008).
The failure showed that the company’s management had to make a difficult choice that would define the future of the company: stick with the data centers or move the entire service to the public cloud. Since Netflix was already generating an enormous quantity of data, they would have to rack the servers in the data centers with impressive speed if they chose to go with the first respective option. The cloud, on the other hand, would allow them to add new servers within minutes, without having to maintain them.
Clearly, the cloud infrastructure was a better choice as well as an opportunity to innovate, so they went with it. The company has transferred all data to AWS Lambda to end up with a true cloud-native app, which made Netflix one of the biggest adopters of serverless at this moment. The choice has contributed to a fast expansion of their service and helped make Netflix a powerhouse it is today.
In recent years, serverless has been adopted by many companies, allowing them to save costs and grow faster. In this article, we’re going to take a look at how exactly serverless apps helped businesses to reach new heights and how you can benefit, too.
Serverless: The Most Common Use Cases
Even though the serverless technology is still pretty much in its early stages of evolution, it’s already being used to support a wide range of critical IT functions by well-known businesses. It’s a good sign since the applications of many technologies before have mostly been limited to side and research & development projects.
To know where entrepreneurs and developers use serverless architecture, we turn to the recent State of Serverless survey that defined the following use cases.
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