You probably heard someone talk about serverless technology around the office or at some conference conference your boss made you go and while understanding it’s merit as a technology doens’t come easy for a person without a technical background. With that said, I’d like to go over the biggest benefits of moving away from a traditional server and stepping into the cloud.

At its core, serverless is not the lack of servers but the existence of a server that does not need to be managed. Using microservices uploaded to Lambda that executes a little bit of code at a time and returning a value, you can build large-scale enterprise level application without having to see a single line of PHP. Now, this might not make everyone as happy as it does me but for a front-end developer like myself, that’s a godsend.

So why is this such a big deal?

It stands to reason that any new technology trying to challenge the old ways of creating, running and hosting web and mobile apps will have a tough time getting support, yet the serverless community has grown exponentially in the past year and the reasons behind the movement are clear.

1. Lower costs
2. Faster deployments
3. Graceful scaling

How does this affect me and my store?

Well, there are a number of major upgrades that a serverless approach can bring to your store. Let’s start with the obvious. The cut in costs. Using a serverless technology is cheaper than your traditional hosting and if you ever hosted a Magento store (or basically any other self-hosted solution) you’ll know just how expensive running, even a semi-successful store can be.

For AWS Lambda, the monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB-s and the free tier provides 400,000 GB-s. The monthly request price is $0.20 per 1 million requests and the free tier provides 1M requests per month.

There are more and more companies sharing their stories on how the cut costs using serverless and if you want to you can read about how companies save money with serverless.

The second reason why going serverless can be of significant value is the unparalleled scaling that can be achieved with serverless. If you do any online shopping around the holidays, especially during the “Black Friday” sales you probably saw your fair share of stores that were down, crumbling under the weight of countless users trying to browse, add to cart or compare products.

Creating microservices for all your websites functionality will improve your page load speed, remove scalability concerns and making changes to your code or business logic will be far easier to implement.