Business Case for Serverless

You can’t pick a technical direction without considering the business implications. Mat Ellis, Founder/CEO of Cloudability, in a recent CloudCast episode, makes the business case for Serverless. The argument goes something like:

• Enterprises know they can’t run services cheaper than Amazon. Even if the cost is 2x the extra agility of the cloud is often worth the multiple.

• So enterprises are moving to the cloud.

• Moving to the cloud is a move to services. How do you build services now? Using Serverless.

• With services businesses use a familiar cost per unit billing model, they can think of paying for services as a cost per database query, cost per terabyte of data, and so on.

• Since employees are no longer managing boxes and infrastructure they can now focus entirely on business goals.

• There’s now an opportunity to change business models. Serverless will make new businesses economically viable because they can do things they could never do before based on price and capabilities.

• Serverless makes it faster to iterate and deploy new code which makes it faster to find a proper product/market fit.

• Smaller teams with smaller budgets with smaller revenues can do things now that only big companies could do before. Serverless attempts to industrialise developer impact.

• Consider WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion with only 55 employees. If we’re going to see the first single employee billion user multi-billion dollar valuation startup it will likely be built on Serverless.