What is a real life example of serverless computing?

In the present day, serverless computing is considered to be a game-changing technology. It has transformed the way in which different applications are deployed and built.

Serverless computing has become the latest buzz in town as FaaS, or Function as a Service. It refers to the cloud computing model, in which the cloud computing service provider handles the infrastructure. In addition, it allocates different resources to run different functions and code snippets. Thus, it removes the need for developers to worry about server management.

There are several serverless benefits. It removes the need for different infrastructure management tasks, like operating system maintenance and physical server maintenance. Thus, you do not need to feel any stress related to the additional space in the server room.

Now, we will discuss some of the real-life examples of serverless computing!

The smart vending machines by Coca-Cola, powered by the IoT

In the year 2016, Coca-Cola was transformed into different cloud-based and serverless vending machines. They are referred to as FreeStyle, which helps save an ample amount of money annually. Thus, potential customers are allowed to order their drinks, get a specific order, and make an online payment. It also provides the option for customers to find the confirmation message on their smart phones through the use of the smart vending machines.

Coca-Cola FreeStyle brought an AWS Properly-Architected Review after following the prototype successfully in April 2020. Such a prototype was brought to the customer testing websites during the earlier part of June. The web application was released to the public after a month. After 100 days of conceptualization were over, the new web application launched 500 machines during the middle to latter part of July. Thus, 10,000 machines came into operation at the end of August.

Before moving to the serverless companies in India, Coca-Cola had to pay almost $13,000 for every machine annually. The serverless deployment decreased the bill to about $4500, thereby reducing the amount by about 66 percent of the previous costs. In the pandemic, FreeStyle systems handled around 80 million queries every month through the touchless experience.

iRobot

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticists launched the iRobot in 1990. The specific company provides multi-usage robots commercially and residentially. In the year 2015, iRobots sold about 14,000 Roomba robotic vacuum units daily. Such kinds of events occurred at the time of the Amazon Prime Day sale. After the successful event, the organization gained high prominence for its innovation.

However, they encountered the first challenge in the very same year, in which they had to launch the primary internet-collected Roomba vacuums. Thus, they made up their minds to move to AWS, or Amazon Web Services. Hence, AWS provides a different combination of hassle-free global services and scalability. iRobots was amazed with serverless architecture, featuring the AWS Lambda and AWS IoT. It saved an ample amount of money for iRoot, as they no longer had to worry about the physical server maintenance and space. Thus, they help keep the project within the specific budget. Thus, they do not need more than 10 resources to execute the new app.

The data-driven clinical decision-making by IDEXX

IDEXXX happens to be a global corporation that offers water, animal husbandry, and different dairy-related products. VetConnect Plus happens to be the latest solution from the company. It was released with the use of Google serverless technologies. It is responsible for the retrieval of different diagnostic summaries from more than 1 billion test results across more than 30,000 veterinary offices. Thus, the product has the ability to accommodate 30 TB of data. It allows for savings of around $500,000 in IT expenditures annually owing to the serverless design.

The primary objective of IDEXX is data consolidation, which is collected across different offerings. AWS allows the business to iterate on the data-lake architecture. Thus, the company can find the best quality solution to conduct huge data volume analysis for more than 6 billion invoice items, 250 million pets, and 600 million medications on the file.

The scalable on-demand media delivery from Netflix

Netflix is another worth-mentioning real-life example of serverless computing. In 2017, such a company was utilizing serverless technology. Before that, it created a specific platform. It has the ability to handle a bunch of modifications daily. It boasts a serverless architecture, which is considered to be the core point of the unique dynamic scripting platform of Netflix. It helps manage end-user delivery, provisioning, and different real platform modifications.

A wide assortment of publishers is submitting a bunch of files to Netflix regularly. It is of paramount importance to encode and categorize the file before broadcasting it to the potential consumer. As the files get uploaded to S3, Amazon comes up with an event, referred to as the AWS Lambda function. It is responsible for breaking the movie into different 5-minute pieces, which are encoded within 60 parallel streams by Netflix. With video segment analysis, it is disseminated and aggregated through the use of rules sets and triggers.

Netflix makes the right use of AWS Lambda for the backup mechanism. In addition, it assures that every single instance is configured and built in compliance with the different rules and regulations of the system.

FINRA

FINRA, or Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, refers to a private operation in the USA. This specific organization is meant to secure market integrity for investors. It was in 2016 when FINRA thought to audit the equity securities, stocks, trade events, and different trading practices. Hence, they made use of the OATS, or Order Audit Trail System, to accumulate different market data. It helps create the prerequisite lifecycle of every order, beginning from the individual to the business organization.

The data collected on a daily basis is massive, as it comes from different exchanges across the country. During the higher trading volume, they get the data twice and three times more than in normal days. To handle the situation, they make up their minds to find the proper solution so that they can host the OATS on a third-party cloud platform. To accomplish this, they conduct a deep analysis of different solutions on the market. To meet the FINRA needs, three concept proofs were created to test the specific scenario. So, they made up their minds to choose the AWS Lambda. As they opt for AWS Lambda, they enhance cost efficiency. So, they make payments only for the resources they use.

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball is recognized as the oldest-running and biggest professional sports league. Statcast happens to be the product of MLBAM. It provides real-time and accurate sports stats to potential customers. Thus, you can execute complicated searches on Statcast sites depending on different variables such as individual player names, season type, pitch type, and pitch velocity. Such a service offers accurate data, thereby guiding baseball game analysis through serverless computing.

Slack chatbots

Serverless computing works wonders for different single-function applications like chatbots, which receive different requests from different complexities. As the chatbot user demands are numerous and unexpected, the allocation of the static server to them leads to underused bandwidth. Henceforth, Slack opts for cloud-based and serverless architectures, depending on AWS Lambda.

The serverless framework offers a standard approach to developing different serverless solutions for the major cloud service providers. Thus, it is equipped with extra CLI tools to boost the developer experience, such as secret management, monitoring, and testing tools, to name a few.