Here’s how 3 major Industries are leveraging the power of Serverless and Container Technologies

Author: Satya

Reading time: 5 mins

Serverless vs Containers

The name ‘Serverless’ can be a little misleading – there is in fact a server involved in a serverless framework. The key distinction is that the management of the infrastructure is handled completely by the cloud provider including scaling based on load, freeing your team to focus completely on development. This is especially valuable in cases where the load on your application varies widely, since scaling happens automatically.

Containerization is an approach where application services are packaged along with all their dependencies into a standardized unit for quick and universal deployment. By using containers in cloud computing, you stand to gain from flexibility of deployment and ease of scalability.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at the ways in which some major industries are making use of Serverless and Container technologies in their tech environments.

1. E-commerce

Very few domains have benefited from the rise of cloud technology as much as the e-commerce industry. 

Containers in cloud computing enable quick and seamless feature development and releases without disturbing the larger e-commerce application, since each service can be separately bundled in a container. In an industry where time-to-market is everything, this is a major competitive advantage.

The e-commerce industry is also seasonal in many ways, with large swings in traffic volumes between a regular day and peak shopping events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Manually managing infrastructure during these fluctuations is a major challenge and can result in poor performance or downtimes. With a Serverless framework, on the other hand, scale-up and scale-down of resources is handled automatically and instantly, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

A good example of the use of Containers and Serverless in the e-commerce industry is Target. With an average of over 100 million e-commerce visitors per month, it’s a major player in the domain, and also one that needed to adopt innovative technologies to meet its needs. By combining deployment through a Kubernetes-based containerized platform, with serverless delivery they were able to achieve over 5400 applications running, 20,000 instances, an incredible 4 deployments per minute on Google Cloud.

2. Banking & Finance

The banking and finance industry involves highly complex processes, and requires extremely reliable and stable systems. The industry is also subject to strict regulation.

In this environment, monolithic applications are a huge limitation when it comes to responding quickly to statutory changes, as well as in ensuring application stability while deploying new features. The ability to deploy applications with microservices architecture using containers is vital to address both these concerns. The agility and maintainability of your application are tremendously improved, with the ability to deploy new services without disturbing existing processes. Additionally, with containerization, you can be sure of reliability of deployments, with no change in behavior between development, testing and production environments.

The finance industry sees huge volumes of transactions – and while this may not be as seasonal as in the case of e-commerce, intra-day volumes vary considerably. For instance, volumes are far higher during working hours than in the night. By spooling up or down server instances in real-time based on load, the savings achieved through this optimized infra management can be considerable.

In the banking and financial services industry, global leader JP Morgan Chase & Co modernized its technology environment with containerization and serverless solutions from AWS. The bank processes over US$ 6 trillion of payments daily and has over 54 million active digital customers. Through the use of AWS Lambda serverless solutions and AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service for containerization, JP Morgan Chase has been able to achieve massive scalability as well as innovation.

3. Software as a Service (SaaS)

In the SaaS industry, the technology that underpins applications is far more than an enabler of efficiency or a driver of a smoother UX. Instead, it lies at the very heart of the business’ product itself. 

Containerization in this case, therefore, goes a long way to making SaaS products easier to update and upgrade. Deploying new features quickly and seamlessly without downtime or bugs on the application is vital to build confidence in a SaaS product. Minimized time-to-market, reliability of deployments from development to testing to production environments, flexibility in choice of programming languages and technologies are all key differentiators enabled by containers. 

In the SaaS industry, application and infrastructure management are central to business success – and therefore, automation of infrastructure management can play a major role in freeing up team members for higher value roles and in optimizing infrastructure costs.

Adobe is one of the largest SaaS businesses in the world, and serves as a good example of effective use of containerization and serverless technologies. They use Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Operator from Azure to manage containerized applications on Microsoft Azure, along with Azure Functions for serverless functions.

We’ve helped businesses across different industries to employ serverless and container technologies and benefit from cost savings, scalability, flexibility, and ease of deployment. It’s not always a case of ‘serverless vs containers’ – e-commerce, finance, and SaaS are just a few examples of industries that have leveraged these technologies to their advantage. Talk to us today to see how your business can benefit from containerization and serverless too.