Big Data in Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges
In this article: How Big Data is revolutionizing healthcare and telehealthChallenges faced by healthcare industry in leveraging Big DataExamples of…
Read MoreToday’s serverless offerings provide developers with the capabilities to run their applications without being concerned with any infrastructure or administration-related issues. Also known as Event-based, or “Functions as a Service” (FaaS), this implementation option has gained in popularity for several reasons. In this article, we will explore the role of serverless offerings, the value they bring, and explain how you can use serverless to elevate your business.
Over the years, we’ve progressed from monolithic applications to microservices, to containers, which created the need for orchestration. Now there is serverless, minimizing developers’ dependence on host environments, increasing flexibility, and lowering overhead costs. The evolutionary path of these programs is not rigid, with many development teams skipping the container movement and going straight to serverless. Most applications were migrated to the cloud, while many are newly developed, built with a Cloud-native approach. Teams can often struggle with the complexities of Kubernetes for container orchestration, driving the search for simpler and oftentimes cheaper options depending on the application workload. Not to mention that many engineering team leaders are continuously struggling to find and keep highly-qualified Kubernetes experts.
Public cloud providers began making things more accessible years ago by providing an attractive option for specific workloads. The infrastructure for these workloads is managed by the cloud provider, allowing architects and developers to focus more on building applications for their product or service – the very thing that should be their primary focus. This gives them the speed and agility needed for their product or service to be competitive in the market and distance themselves from their competition.
If you are considering an investment in Serverless, the following are advantages that Serverless architectures can offer:
Not all workloads are right for utilizing the serverless approach.The following are five workload scenarios whose application makes them a good candidate for Serverless.
There are ways you can mitigate vendor lock-in concerns, which we will explore in-depth in our next Serverless article. We will demonstrate the same exact serverless code working in multiple cloud provider offerings. There is a trade-off between total flexibility (no vendor lock-in) and development speed and agility, and where you run your code is just one design decision in the overall technical architecture. If your application needs to run in multiple cloud providers and maybe even on prem, then different solutions would be in order. For instance, instead of using a cloud provider’s queueing service, you could consider implementing an open source equivalent and managing it yourself. While this does give you the portability to run anywhere, it creates more challenges specifically around deployment, management and administration, all of which will slow you down.
I recommend to evaluate the lock-in factor for each major component in the architecture and ask the following two questions:
Answers to these questions will help you determine the best course of action.
The serverless option is not perfect. However, it’s finally getting the attention it deserves, and it’s improving daily. Instead of asking ourselves, “what apps would we run on serverless?”, the question now becomes, “which ones would we not run this way?” Developers can now focus on building game-changing applications in record time and not worry about the infrastructure and administration required to run them. Sure sounds like a win-win. If you have questions or comments about this Serverless article or would like to speak with one of our architects directly about serverless implementation, please fill out the form and we will respond.
Dave Moore is GAP’s Chief Innovation Officer. He is a seasoned technology executive with more than 25 years of experience in conceptualization and crafting innovative solutions that provide scalability, widespread end-user adoption, and substantially increased revenue. Dave’s experience has given him unique insight into building diverse teams, and expert knowledge of microservices, Serverless, cloud optimization, CI/CD, security, big data and open-source technologies. You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn, or send him an email.
In this article: How Big Data is revolutionizing healthcare and telehealthChallenges faced by healthcare industry in leveraging Big DataExamples of…
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