The emerging concept of serverless computing in the cloud demands even more change of IT admins and cloud operations teams, ranging from the way they track cloud costs to the management tools they use.
Serverless computing changes public cloud costs
Serverless computing is a model for public cloud services in which users pay to run application components, rather than for the resources on which they run. With serverless computing, cloud providers don’t charge for standby resources, and applications aren’t assigned to a specific hosting environment. Cloud providers decide where to run an application component when it’s needed, based on service-level agreements and their own resource efficiencies.
For serverless computing, a cloud operations team needs to rethink application costs based on the usage of each separate application component. To start, deploy traditional monitoring tools to find out how often your applications are used. Used, in this sense, means given work to do — not just being available. Those usage rates, combined with the serverless pricing models of cloud providers, will tell you which provider will run serverless applications at the lowest cost and which applications may be unsuitable for the serverless model.
Serverless computing takes the explicit notion of a cloud server away. Instead of paying a fixed price for the server instance, you pay when your application runs. That means applications with spotty usage would likely cost you less, and those that run continuously might cost more.
