Serverless // NoOps // Scalability // Agility // Silicon Valley
Published on Jul 05, 2024
Scalability, Speed & Savings — This is why Silicon Valley is choosing Serverless & Edge Computing
Discover how Serverless Computing ensures seamless operations for brands like Netflix, Adobe, Coca-Cola, Airbnb, and Capital One.
TL;DR
Serverless refines efficiency by charging based on usage and scaling seamlessly as demands fluctuate both horizontally and vertically.
It powers streaming at Netflix, collaboration on Figma, enables agile transactions at Coca-Cola, optimizes search and pricing at Airbnb, and ensures rapid fraud detection at Capital One.
This approach not only saves costs but also enhances flexibility, making it indispensable for modern business operations.
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Mandalorian drops on Disney Plus, millions of fans rush toward it, yet your Simpsons binge hasn’t buffered for a second. Sure, the backend engineers can anticipate that surge. But what about the last India vs South Africa match when Kohli spawned on the pitch and the viewership went twofold?
That’s when you need Serverless Computing the most.
1. Ting plan that saves you millions: Just like your ‘pay-as-you-go’ phone plan, devs are charged only for the computation they consume. Functions are triggered when needed by the application and the code automatically scales up, making the provisioning dynamic and precise.
2. Two-Dimensional Scalability: By design, Serverless can scale horizontally across any geographic region and vertically across load spikes whenever they occur. If an event-triggered function needs to be run, the vendor’s systems will boot up, run the function on nodes, and end them.
3. Low Time-to-Market: Backend has traditionally bogged down deployments as devs had to make changes to the whole config. Instead, they can upload code either all at once or in chunks. Since applications aren’t monolithic, the “when” and “how much” aspects get provisioned by vendors.
Your favorite companies have already gone Serverless.
Would you keep the TV turned on if nobody’s watching it? Now multiply it by millions of users and you’ll realize why brands want to eliminate this idle capacity. Even for brands that can afford armories full of computation, operational costs of centralized systems can quickly bleed them dry.
Top Picks by Rupak
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1. On-the-fly video transcoding and delivery at Netflix
6.1 billion hours. 238.39 million subscribers. 190 countries. If your Simpsons binge is still running, it’s obvious why Netflix relies so heavily on AWS Lambda for transcoding. The moment you hear Ta-Dum, Lambda functions start transcoding the source into desired formats, resolutions, and bitrates.
The functions are event-triggered, accommodating varying demand and auto-scaling without the need for a fleet of monolithic systems. Apart from offering granular control over delivery, this architecture ensures optimal experience for users across different devices and network conditions.
2. Realtime design collaboration at Adobe Figma
When you are running a cloud-based collaboration platform with millions of projects, you need an elastic infrastructure that provides responsive experiences. Serverless does that by handling unpredictable workloads so that designers can focus on collaboration rather than managing files.
The system needs to sync changes, render previews, and manage interactions. Just like Netflix, functions can be event-triggered like a user making an edit or moving an element. These functions execute necessary computations, validate permissions, and broadcast changes to all collaborators.
3. When was the last time you ordered a Coke?
Coca-Cola’s market is just as immaculate as Netflix’s – but rather, on crates, pallets, and vending machines. The logic is simple. You purchase a drink; the machine calls a payment gateway, then it calls an AWS gateway that triggers a Lambda function. Finally, Lambda handles the business logic.
Moreover, they use Serverless to process transactions and historical patterns, all while paying only for computing resources used. This agility also enables them to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, resulting in more accurate demand forecasting, and reduced inventory handling costs.
4. Making sure you get the best prices at Airbnb
The deeper you go into a company’s Serverless infra, the more synonymous you’ll find Lambda to be. Even for Airbnb, when a user searches for accommodations, Lambda functions handle tasks like querying the database, and filtering search results, while calculating pricing and availability.
Nathan Blecharczyk, CTO of Airbnb says, “It was great to be able to ramp up more servers without having minimum usage commitments.” Additionally, Serverless can enhance security by allowing Airbnb to run functions in isolated environments, reducing the risk of breaches and spamming.
5. Finances aren’t as archaic as you might think
The top Serverless use case for Capital One is its fraud detection. Within milliseconds of making a transaction, functions start pulling in data and applying Machine Learning models. These models assess the transaction for potential fraud based on historical events, anomalies, and other factors.
If a transaction is flagged as suspicious, an alert is sent to appropriate teams or automated processes are initiated. This event-driven architecture allows Capital One to respond to potential fraud in real-time, exemplifying how Serverless computing can deliver agility in the banking space.
But monolithic architectures aren’t a veritable dinosaur.
You know “Serverless Computing" is a bit of a misnomer, right? But there’s another misconception that monolithic architectures are obsolete. While that’s not entirely wrong, the focus should rather be on finding a hybrid solution that meets both their best practices and security considerations.
Rupak Bid // Content Strategist for Web3 and SaaS Brands
I'm the former Head of Content at Burency Global. My experience in working with startups — as well as delivering content to Fortress Trust, Messari, and Immutable — brings you decades of learning from building Web3-specific strategies. Have a project or planning to enter the Web3 space? I can:
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Help your brand with hyper-personalized content strategies.
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Help your brand to build a community of informed users.
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Help your brand with product launches and ICOs.
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Offer you Fractional Marketing roles and advisory.
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Build an extensive catalog of content that keeps converting.
I treat content as a product — and just like any product — content needs constant improvements. My job is to design the content strategy for your brand, monitor the CTA catalysts at each step, and if they’re not working, decide a different one. By signing me, you are working with someone who:
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Helped a brand hit 47,000 users and assisted many ICOs.
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Tells stories to drive interactions and how they worked.
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Turns demand into data, and then, data into Dollars.
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Starts a flywheel of growth, until community takes over.
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Most importantly, sees you as a partner, not just a client.
You seem like someone I love to work with — a Startup, an Entrepreneur, or a Thought Leader? If my service offerings seem exactly like what you might be looking for, I’d be excited to learn about your project. Please reach out on LinkedIn or book a discovery call at https://www.rupakbid.com/#book.