5 Ways You Can Save On Costs With Serverless Services

Hello there! Welcome to The Serverless Spotlight! I'm Uriel Bitton, a solutions architect on AWS and I'm here to teach you everything I know about serverless computing and optimizing for costs on the cloud.

I have built and architected over 15 serverless web applications with 12 years of experience in software development and cloud technologies.

In the first edition of The Serverless Spotlight, I'll be sharing with you 5 ways serverless services can help you save and optimize costs.

Have you ever built on the cloud only to be appalled by unexpected costs for certain services?

Perhaps, you are even avoiding the cloud because it is costing you too much.

If so you are not alone. Building on the cloud can be empowering and will simplify your development but it can also become quickly expensive.

One way to optimize your costs is by using more serverless services.

With serverless computing, you can adopt a pay-per-use pricing model instead of the fixed pricing model you may be used to.

When implemented correctly and with proper practices, serverless costs can become quite efficient.

Let's take a look at the main benefits serverless services provide on your journey to become cost-efficient, without compromising on scalability or performance.

1. Pay-per-use Pricing Model

With serverless services, you only pay for what you use. In contrast, with non-serverless services, the typical pricing model offers a pricing plan where you pay a constant and fixed price for your resources even when they are not in use.

With physical servers and infrastructures, you will be charged the same costs whether usage is low or normal.

When usage is high, your server can become overloaded and you would need to provision more servers, add load balancers, and spend a lot of time managing and maintaining them, adding to your costs significantly.

Many applications today run mostly ephemeral transactions - where very short bursts of computing are used. Running a server 365 days a year may prove to be a waste of resources and money in many situations.

With serverless functions, the ephemeral transactions on your web app are executed only for the duration of the transaction and automatically stopped when they are done, charging you for the brief few hundred milliseconds they ran, making it a very cost-effective alternative.

2. Eliminate Infrastructure Management Overhead

There are two cost-savings aspects in the context of infrastructure management:

1. Eliminating the management of servers
2. Eliminating costs associated with hiring the required expertise

When you no longer have to maintain servers, you not only save on the costs of the actual servers, but you also save on the costs associated with managing, patching, and fixing your servers when - not if - they go down.

Second, when hosting a fleet of servers in your data center, hiring the expertise required to maintain and manage them is expensive.

With serverless services, you eliminate the need for this expertise since serverless functions require no more than a typical developer to write and deploy these serverless functions.

The process is quick and simple, helping you test and deploy solutions faster than you ever could with servers.

3. Auto Scaling And Elasticity

Serverless services like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB, easily scale to match your workloads. You don't need to set up auto-scaling or provision capacity manually.

Without serverless resources, to scale a typical SQL database vertically and horizontally (increased memory/compute power and more storage nodes), you would have to provision more storage nodes and instances to handle an increase in requests to your database and you would also need to configure a load balancer to distribute the traffic to your database evenly.

This requires a lot of expertise and elevated costs to accomplish.

With DynamoDB, capacity can be configured to be provisioned on-demand (automatically based on your usage). With DynamoDB Global Tables you can remain highly available with little effort - DynamoDB will manage the data replication seamlessly.

On-demand mode also keeps your capacity elastic, which means it will automatically scale up and scale down to meet your traffic and usage patterns dynamically, so you don't have to worry about it.

This optimizes your costs enormously since when your usage is low, you pay nothing, only paying when the traffic resumes.

Furthermore, other services like Lambda and API Gateway will auto-scale to millions of reads and writes per second, with minimal manual intervention.

4. Reduced Development Time

Serverless services are all about faster and more efficient development. With serverless functions, you can experiment quickly, at extremely low costs.

With AWS Lambda, you get 1 million function executions for free each month.

DynamoDB offers 25 free read/write capacity units for your NoSQL database.

Thus, launching a fully or hybrid serverless application with AWS can potentially cost you next to nothing and take minutes in total, instead of hours or days.

With serverless services, you can deploy functions, instantiate a NoSQL database, and deploy a serverless restAPI, all within minutes.

With negligible costs at smaller scales and development agility, you are empowered with enormous advantages like time-to-market, improved agile CICD, and rapid experimentation.

These benefits are typically not possible with "server-full" infrastructures.

5. AWS Free Tiers

Finally, AWS offers some quite generous free-tier services and up to $ 100,000 USD in credits for qualifying startups wanting to build on AWS.

Some services are really low in cost and some are even free.

DynamoDB, Lambda, S3, API Gateway, and AppSync are all good examples of serverless services that can be used at extremely low prices or even for free.

Some services like Aurora, Cognito, and SNS, have free tiers with generous amounts of free usage per month which you can take advantage of to experiment and build in the cloud.

Conclusion

Transitioning to serverless services presents a promising solution for businesses struggling with infrastructure costs. By embracing a pay-per-use model, eliminating infrastructure management overhead, leveraging auto-scaling features, and reducing development time, organizations can not only optimize their expenses but also enhance their agility and innovation. With the added benefits of AWS's free-tier offerings and credits for startups, the shift towards serverless architectures and infrastructures becomes even more compelling and accessible.

My name is Uriel Bitton and I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Serverless Spotlight. Please consider sharing it with your network if you did.

You can also explore my social media links here:

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*my blog website is coming soon, stay tuned for that.

I hope to see you in the next week's edition!

Uriel