Security must become application centric in a server-
less world. This translates to deep instrumentation
within the application to capture all events, requests
and behavior. Simple monitoring and alerting can
then be used as a baseline to identify and stop anom-
alous behavior, while advanced machine learning can
be leveraged to respond to previously unknown, but
malicious behavior.
DevOps
Many organizations have adopted DevOps models
and principles as part of their cloud journey. DevOps
was leveraged as a proven set of methods for rapidly
releasing high quality code with regular feature
improvements. As serverless becomes more domi-
nant, the principles that drive DevOps adoption
become more critical to an organization’s application
deployment success.
With serverless, there is no tradi-
tional operating system to interact
with, as a result many of the methods
commonly used for building and
releasing an application simply will
not work.
The use of DevOps principles will ensure more suc-
cessful adoption of serverless computing by enabling
developers to take complete ownership of the appli-
cation pipeline and be empowered to respond to any
incident or feedback from application users.
geted thresholds. Previous server-based models cre-
ated artificial boundaries, either server or virtual
machine size, to ensure that unchecked application
code did not cause large financial expenditures.
Previous IT systems did capacity planning at pur-
chase or deployment time and rarely ever looked at
capacity again until major refreshes. That cycle must
become constant in a serverless world due to the risk
of ballooning costs if application architectures do not
match the billing models of the cloud providers.
One key element of serverless is its time-based billing
models. This can be further complicated by auto scal-
ing and triggers that run services as needed. It is
important to ensure that any financial models account
for this consumption model and map it to users so that
costs can be adequately passed along to business units
or consumers for periods of high usage.
Conclusion
Serverless computing provides organizations many
advantages, from the ability to eliminate all manage-
ment of operating systems, to more discreet billing
models. While there is huge value to operations,
there are fundamental changes that must occur
within operational processes, security monitoring,
financial management and code deployment pipe-
lines. Serverless computing enables organizations to
get closer to a model where developers can create
features and capabilities and have them deployed
without human intervention, in a highly scalable and
reliable manner.
DevOps also pushes small, self-organizing and dis-
crete teams to ensure end-to-end ownership for these
functional pieces, while consuming capabilities from
related organizations. Serverless provides a strong
foundation for this separation of application function-
ality into discrete elements for simplified maintenance
and elimination of team-to-team dependencies.
Financial Management & Governance
The serverless services from all cloud providers
deliver the ability to auto-scale services based on
demand. While this can lower the operational over-
head to accommodate growth in traffic and users, if
left unchecked, costs can quickly grow beyond bud-
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