Serverless computing: economic and architectural impact

Abstract

Amazon Web Services unveiled their "Lambda" platform in late 2014. Since then, each of the major cloud computing infrastructure providers has released services supporting a similar style of deployment and operation, where rather than deploying and running monolithic services, or dedicated virtual machines, users are able to deploy individual functions, and pay only for the time that their code is actually executing. These technologies are gathered together under the marketing term "serverless" and the providers suggest that they have the potential to significantly change how client/server applications are designed, developed and operated. This paper presents two case industrial studies of early adopters, showing how migrating an application to the Lambda deployment architecture reduced hosting costs - by between 66% and 95% - and discusses how further adoption of this trend might influence common software architecture design practices.