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.