Serverless strategy - Micro services vs Traditional Applications

When you are implementing a new application in your organization, you are onboarding in the world of infrastructure management, one of the more expensive areas of the technology and have to start dealing with terms like "end of life" or "extended warranty fees" that usually are more expensive than the application that is generating money for your company.

To setup an application you have to install a server that should run 7/24 because you don't know when the customer or your employees will access the application, you have to buy a good machine that support the load to run all day and all night, then you have to ensure that it will have power and network all time, it's an additional monthly cost. Also you have to hire a company or a team to keep it running and provide support to internal and external users.

General understanding where are the cost of infrastructure in the implementation of an in-house application.

If this fragile infrastructure fails just in the moment that a customer is accessing their information, you have to deal with a unhappy customer.

When you scale it following the growing of your organization, you have to add more servers, more locations and bigger infrastructure support team, that will cost the organization a huge amount of money on daily basis, reducing the space to investing in business growing and a consuming big amounts of money on bills to pay on monthly basis.

The first strategy to solve this issue with multiple locations is to consolidate all the applications in one location with all the technical guarantees to run it 7/24, be compliant with regulations, requirements and keeping the customers and employees happy with your systems and your business. This strategy is costly at the beginning because you have to invest a lot of money in the location, then you have to maintain the infrastructure running renewing the machines periodically, protecting from different kinds of attacks and dealing with the obsolescence of the infrastructure software.

Now, I make a question.

Why do you have to paid a lot of time for an infrastructure that you use 40% of the time to generate income?

The application is not be accessing during night/off work hours, also, during the the working ours is not being used all time, in addition, your company is not using all functionalities all time. What happen if I uninstall the sever that process my taxes during the year and I'm only install it by tax session? What happen if the payroll module shutdown during the month and just start it the day that the company calculate the payroll until the day that pay to the employees and print pay stubs?

In the model that we are evaluating now, the company have to pay in full for the cost of the infrastructure service besides it's in use or not, you have the server connected, you are paying for the rent of the space, you are paying for the technical support, you are paying the license of the operative system, you are paying the energy bill.

What happen if you could pay just for the time and resources that the company is using in a particular period of time?

Now days, the experts in infrastructure are offering a high performance, dependable, secure platform that you could rent by second/minute/hour/day of month, that let you implement whatever you want to generate the income that you like. This platform is the Cloud. Call it AWS, Google Cloud, VMWare or any other solution available, they have the servers, they have the experts, they pay the energy bill, they pay for the license and the provide everything to the customer according with real needs.

As part of those services, the cloud providers offer the opportunity split your application in small parts in order to separate functionalities in a very granular level, and create a new micro environment to run each part of the application and this micro environment will be stay down until the functionality is needed, a simple process trigger the micro environment, this event could be to put a file in a specific folder, or receive a message from a particular source; if you need to use the functionality more than one time in parallel, the cloud will provide you multiple copies of the micro environment to run the functionality in parallel without delays in customer side. Now, you have to pay a rent of the server for the number of seconds that process use to return the information. This cost is very small comparing to the cost of the infrastructure that you have to pay if you have a dedicated server to run this functionality available 7/24.

Other awesome advantage to use this serverless architecture is that you have performance on-demand, because for any invocation that you perform on the application, you will reserve a separate, independent instance with the requirements adapted to the functionally that is running, generating a feeling in the end user side that the server never get overloaded and the information and functionalities are 100% of the time available.

It's particular helpful if you have a business need to resolve particular workloads in response to a business event, like a marketing campaign, sales season or monthly cycles with defined process, that generate a high volume of use of a particular functionality of the application during a defined period of time from business side, this period of time is identified like an event in the architecture such as a new input of a client request in the database or upload a file with a new order in the website; this event will trigger the function and the platform will allocate the resources meanwhile the function process the information.Once the process is finish the resources will be released.

In order to reach this model, the application should be develop using the strategy of micro services, generating a perfect split over the functionalities that let identify all the actions that are possible to perform and a clear sequence between the actions following a workflow that it is aligned with business needs and cover all the details of the process. All the actions should be configured as micro services with a clear input, trigger and output and it should be invoked by an big orchestation process similar to an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), that knows the workflow and the actions involved in the workflow.

I'll detail in the next article the idea of ESB and workflows to coordinate micro services.

Conclusion:

It's cheaper to implement and maintain microservices as strategy to implement applications in the organization, however, it should be consider from the beginning of the project.

Cloud storage advantage

These days every company has to keep information about their business in digital format, data is related to accounting, operations, clients or whatever the company do to generate money.

Every single piece of this information has  different condition to be store, keep and access according with their nature and sensitivity. The drivers of those conditions are regulatory, strategic or controls; and each section has different set of stakeholders.

In order to keep this big amount of information aligned and fulfilling the big amount of conditions, each company has two possible ways:

1. Build their own infrastructure to keep the information safe.

2. Delegate this management to an expert partner.

Both options are valid and extensive uses by different companies in all sectors of the economy across the world.We will analyze both.

1. Own infrastructure:

Due to the huge set of alternatives that the company could select on this way, it makes this way so complicated, you could start from keep all the information in the hard drive of your computer in a good identified set of folders or you could build a huge data center in a remote location.

In general, each requirement that you have to keep your data will generate an extra cost to your company.

If you have to keep three spreadsheets with accounting information from your first year, those spreadsheets should be stored in a pen drive or a CD that have to pay part of your rent during next X number of years until the Tax authorities said that it's not relevant.

Escalate it to the next level, your company has a small sales team that use a local CRM open source application, you have this application running in the powerful desktop that your company have under your desk. You paid a big amount of money for your machine, you have to keep it running all time and you have to contract a guy to keep it in good shape, also, you have to keep a separate backup of the information in CRM database for at least 1 month. You are investing more than one hour per day in keep your infrastructure running and paying an extra cost in your electricity bill on monthly basis. Also, you have to keep the backup safe in a second location that also should have to pay for rent.

Now, your small CRM is a headache, that is consuming time and resources and generating operative dependencies and additional stress changing the focus of the company to support systems in stead of generate money.

If you escalete it to the next levels, could understand that every single piece of data that you put in your company, will generate an infraestructure cost in the future.

2. Delegate it to an expert, cloud expert:


In the same case, you could start working with the spreadsheets in cloud platform editing it online with free tools, and storing it in an online storage that with bill you a couple of cents per month for the usage, once you stop to use this spreadsheet on daily basis, you could move it to a cold storage that generate just a couple of cents per year.

If you escalete it to the next level, you could buy a CRM for about five dollars per month including infrastructure and backup according with complex requirements according with your business needs; if you need to grow your business, your application could configure to escalete in infraestructure to support more traffic; if you need more applications just add to your package in the same infraestructure and increase your bill according with your needs.