2
Adoption of serverless strategies is on the rise. In fact, over 75 percent of
organizations surveyed report that they have either implemented a serverless
strategy or are planning to do so in the next two years (451 Research). Current
customers are also doing more with serverless technologies—AWS users run
serverless compute service AWS Lambda 3.5 times more in 2021 than they did in
2019 (Datadog).
The popularity of a serverless strategy is growing because it provides the
opportunity for faster time to market by dynamically and automatically allocating
compute and memory based on user requests. It also provides cost savings through
hands-off infrastructure management, which enables organizations to redirect IT
budget and development resources from operations to innovation. The pay-for-use
model with serverless technologies leads to a shift from large capital expenditure
lockup to flexible, on-demand consumption, allowing users to scale, customize, and
provision computing resources dynamically to meet their exact needs. This, in turn,
increases business agility.
But predicting costs in a pay-for-use model can be difficult if the inputs are variable.
And prospective customers want to optimize costs by comparing server- or virtual
machine–based computing with serverless options. In 2019, we introduced a
framework for comparing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for both serverless
and server-based applications, factoring in infrastructure, development, and
maintenance costs. In that analysis, we concluded that while infrastructure costs
may be higher with a serverless approach, the TCO is significantly lower due to
savings in development and maintenance costs.
Deloitte
Industry Insight
