Episode 46: On Shifting to Serverless with Josh Murray and Scott Huff of Rebar Technology
What is serverless? And what are the benefits of switching to serverless from traditional servers that most of us are used to?
In this week’s episode of Subscriptions: Scaled, we discuss everything serverless with Rebar Technology’s Full Stack Developer Josh Murray and Senior Solutions Engineer Scott Huff.
Whether you’re already aware of serverless or you’ve never heard of the term, Josh and Scott teach us plenty about the cloud-native development model.
Keep reading to learn exactly what serverless is, how it differs from traditional servers, its main benefits, and so much more.
Rebar Technology
Rebar Technology hosts the Subscription: Scaled podcast, and the company provides management software for customers to manage their subscriptions.
The brand offers a wide range of development, integration, and operational services to help companies provide a customized customer and business billing subscription service. This helps improve the efficiency of the subscription business model and reduce operating costs.
Rebar can build the integrations needed for a subscription service.
The brand offers services and technologies for subscription brands, including:
Checkout
Product offers platform
Reporting analytics
Chargeback management
Payment gateway integrations to allow subscription payment services
What Is Serverless?
The episode begins with Josh and Scott explaining what serverless is. We learn that serverless is a method of providing backend services on an as-used basis.
Josh describes serverless as a mechanism that you can use to build and run applications without managing as much infrastructure as you usually would. This allows teams to have smaller workloads when it comes to provisioning, scaling, and maintenance.
Serverless lets you use the server as you need it instead of having it running all the time. You use the server whenever you need to get something done.
The server spins up as needed and will stay spun for a small amount of time to speed up additional tasks that may arise. With serverless, convenience is key.
The Benefits of Serverless
Josh and Scott discuss the benefits of serverless and how it differs from traditional servers. We learn that essentially everything you can do on a conventional server you can do serverless.
One of the main benefits is that with serverless, you only pay for what you use. Compare this to traditional servers running 24 hours a day that you have to pay for continuously.
For small-scale use, serverless is particularly valuable. For example, if you have one employee who signs in at three o'clock in the morning, you’re only paying for that one request instead of covering 24 hours a day for the whole month.
Developers can also set up multiple environments a lot easier with serverless. Plus, there are no extra costs involved with setting up these multiple environments.
Scott explains that some of the problems they’ve had with traditional servers are that the development servers don’t match the production servers. With serverless, you don’t have to worry about these issues.
Serverless vs Traditional Servers
As mentioned, Scott explains that everything you can do with serverless, you can do with a traditional server. The difference is that with traditional servers, in many cases, the server is sitting there unused, costing you money. On the other hand, serverless doesn’t cost you any money when it isn’t being used.
With serverless, you can set up a website and run it for around ten dollars or less because there is so little usage. When your product or service grows and you receive more volume, you can scale up to match the demand.
As your usage goes up with serverless, so does the cost. However, it’s not a huge investment up front compared to having vast servers that are sitting there idle until they’re used. This is especially valuable for entrepreneurs and start-ups new to the subscription service industry with limited funds for investment.
Why Don’t More People Move to Serverless?
The main reason why companies and individuals stick to a traditional server is that they are used to it and are reluctant to change. Generally, it can be challenging to convince people to move to a more efficient way of working when they’re used to a specific method.
Many people are used to working on traditional servers and have become very accustomed to using its architecture. Plus, taking something that was built in a conventional way and turning it serverless can be pretty daunting.
Josh describes it as taking an idea, cutting it up into pieces, and then putting it into smaller sections of code. It’s a challenging task to take something and change the architecture completely.
There’s a learning curve that comes with changing a traditional server to serverless.
At some level, you will require some expertise on how serverless works. As well as that, it would be best if you had someone with experience in how your system works.
You need someone to determine whether it’s going to be cost effective in the long-term to move to serverless.
Switching to Serverless
Josh explains that you can move to serverless slowly. Any time you change something or add something new, you add in a serverless way, moving into it slowly.
Switching everything over to serverless doesn’t have to mean switching everything at once. You can still work with small pieces at a time.
He says that’s something a lot of people are unaware of if they’re more familiar with conventional servers. You don’t have to drop everything and jump over to serverless at once.
The main challenge in switching to serverless is whether teams have someone with expertise in a serverless architecture. And can that person overcome any security concerns related to changing to serverless? This is one worry that many companies have.
However, despite these security concerns, Josh explains that his team still hasn’t come across any security concerns that it hasn't been able to overcome within the serverless ecosystems.
Serverless and Flexibility
The episode wraps up with Josh and Scott sharing what they think the main benefit of serverless is. They both agree it’s the flexibility serverless offers since it can adapt to almost any need.
When you’re launching a new subscription product or service, flexibility is key when introducing that product to the market.
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