AWS serverless compute: Boost innovation and build faster applications – News

As Amazon Web Services Inc. continues to offer various transformative advantages, AWS serverless compute empowers organizations to innovate faster, operate more cost-effectively and scale effortlessly, making it a true game-changer for modern cloud-native application development, according to Nick Coult (pictured), director of product, serverless compute, at AWS. 

As a result, serverless compute makes the lives of developers easier by shifting the focus from infrastructure management to building applications and services, he added. 

“When you look at the fact that AWS pioneered serverless 10 years ago and now you’ve got a lot of serverless or serverless-like offerings out there, it just validates our approach,” Coult said. “We offer really the best of AWS through serverless, through the integrations that we offer, whether that’s integrations with CloudWatch or integrations with our storage services so that when you as a developer, you’re building your code, you’re running it on serverless compute, you have access to those other services that you need through the integrations that we offer.”

Coult spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rob Strechay for theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why AWS serverless compute is a stepping stone toward faster innovations and cost-efficient operations across businesses. (* Disclosure below.)

Delving deeper into AWS serverless compute operating model

By abstracting away infrastructure complexities, AWS serverless compute provides a highly efficient, scalable and cost-effective operating model that empowers developers and businesses to innovate faster, Coult explained. This is made a reality through services, such as AWS Lambda, which eliminate the need to provision, manage or maintain servers.

“Serverless, one way that we think about it is really as an operating model, and in that operating model, what we want to help customers do is move faster,” Coult said. “I lead product management for serverless compute at AWS. That’s a portfolio of products focused on compute, so that includes Lambda, the serverless function service, Amazon Elastic Container Service, and Fargate, as well as what we call application integration.” 

Since the primary objective of the serverless operating model is to focus on the things that deliver value, AWS has crafted various principles. They include abstracting complexity, composing primitives, integrating other services and well-architected fundamentals, Coult pointed out.

“One way that we break that down is into four principles,” he said. “One of those is this idea of abstracting a way, the complexity of infrastructure management. What that really means is you take something like a Lambda function. A Lambda function is a really simple construct that is wrapping up a whole bunch of things behind the scenes so that you as a developer don’t have to think about those things.”

Composing primitives is crucial in serverless computing because serverless architectures thrive on simplicity, modularity and scalability. This is founded on the fact that primitives effectively allow developers to build robust, flexible and maintainable systems, according to Coult.

“The second one is this idea that you build an application in serverless by composing these primitives together,” he said. “By composing those primitives together, you don’t have to write as much code, things that in a monolithic world, you would’ve had as a developer to write code, to manage a queue and make sure the right code gets executed. Another one is around there’s a lot more to an application than just code. There’s other things that you need. You need observability. You need storage. You need networking. You need databases.”

Well-architected fundamentals are crucial in serverless computing because they provide a structured approach to ensure that the applications are reliable, scalable, secure and cost-efficient. This is because the responsibility of infrastructure management shifts to the cloud provider, Coult pointed out.

“The last one is more subtle, but it’s a really interesting one,” he said. “That’s the idea of well-architected fundamentals. When we talk to customers, we talk about things like your availability zone, how you should balance across availability zones and how you should manage capacity. When you use a service like Lambda, all of that is taken care of for you. You don’t actually have to think about those things because we are doing well-architected fundamentals on your behalf. Those four principles really are the underlying concepts behind how serverless helps customers move faster.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage”:

(* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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