Serverless computing is the next big thing in India- Sumed Marwaha, Managing Director, Unisys India
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sumed Marwaha, Managing Director, Unisys India
- Current state of serverless computing in India and how is it expected to grow.
The pervasiveness of digitization in India is evident in every aspect of our lives, from financial transactions to e-governance. To remain competitive, organizations must constantly improve and innovate to meet changing customer expectations. As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, customers are seeking ways to optimize operations and pay only for what they use. This need gave birth to the disruptive paradigm of serverless computing.
Serverless computing refers to a cloud computing model where the cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure, and handlers only pay for the actual usage of their code. This approach cuts the need for businesses to manage their own servers and reduces operational costs.
In India, serverless computing has gained traction in recent years due to the growing demand for digital transformation and cloud-native application development. As per the analysis of a report by Verified Market Research on serverless computing market in 2022 suggests that the market has great potential in the country and is the adoption is expected to reach a value of $36.84 billion by 2028 globally. The availability of serverless computing services from major cloud providers has made it easier for businesses to adopt this model. Startups and medium-sized enterprises have an edge when it comes to adopting serverless computing methods and they help in quickly developing and deploying applications at scale.
- Does Unisys provide any serverless computing solutions? If yes, how?
Yes, Unisys provides serverless computing solutions to help organizations accelerate their digital transformation journey. We offer a range of serverless solutions that improves developer productivity and experience across the entire lifecycle – including application development, deployment, and management, which are simple and quick for organizations to develop and deploy innovative, cloud-native applications. Our serverless solutions are designed to help businesses build and deploy modern, cloud-native applications quickly and easily.
Unisys serverless solutions can help across variety of use cases including web applications, mobile backends, business logic, stream processing etc. As an example, with mobile backends use case, it allows developers to focus on mobile app and spend less time on infrastructure, scalability of its backend. Developers also can improve their productivity by reusing various assets, such as services and functions.
Unisys provides a security solution for the container environment specifically Kubernetes for the commercial cloud. The Unisys Stealth Operator for Kubernetes leverages Unisys Stealth to assign security policies dynamically and automatically to Kubernetes services as the environment scales. When the Stealth Operator for Kubernetes is deployed in the Kubernetes cluster, Stealth enabled Kubernetes nodes can communicate with Stealth-enabled endpoints outside of the cluster that share Stealth Communities of Interest (COIs). The solution was deployed on Azure and Amazon services and tested with positive results.
- How can enterprises take advantage of serverless computing? Does it help beyond cost-saving?
The fundamental goal for any business is to cut back on the time and money spent managing and maintaining servers. The deployment of on-prem hardware is a challenging undertaking for every enterprise. Most businesses often struggle to scale their resources quickly enough. Therefore, enterprises across a variety of sectors are paying close attention to serverless computing.
In this model, the enterprise only pays for the computing resources it uses on a per-request premise – while the cloud service provider controls the infrastructure, including the servers, storage, and networking. It is gaining prominence as it allows enterprises to concentrate on creating and deploying applications rather than worrying about supporting infrastructure.
As the consumers only pay-per-use, organizations do not incur any expenses while the infrastructure is idle. This can dramatically reduce the cost for organizations. It allows better flexibility to scale, enhances employee productivity and increases the pace of the product delivery process.
The real benefit of serverless is also that the developers only focus on the business logic, and it cuts down the overall development and deployment effort and results in faster time to market.
With serverless system, you break down applications into fine-grained components by a process known as decomposition. By doing so, you’ll gain better observability across the application and this also aids in the overall maintainability of the application.
Beyond the advantage of cost saving, the overall business results of enterprises are significantly impacted by serverless computing. Companies may enhance their agility, reduce complexity, boost reliability, and supply superior services to their clients by using this computing architecture.
- What are some of the common challenges of serverless computing and how to overcome them?
One of the main challenges of serverless computing is cold start latency, which refers to the delay in the execution of a function that occurs when it has not been used for some time. This can result in slower response time and poor user experience. One way to mitigate this issue is to use techniques such as pre-warming or keeping functions warm, where a function is run periodically to keep it in a warm state so that it can be executed more quickly when needed.
Another challenge is running workloads, which are long-running and could be more expensive on serverless architecture. Using a dedicated server is often more efficient. Serverless computing poses a challenge for businesses that need more control over the underlying infrastructure, such as for regulatory or compliance reasons, because its foundation is the idea of handing control of the infrastructure over to the cloud service provider. Enterprises can overcome this difficulty by collaborating with their cloud service provider to make sure they have the controls and visibility over the infrastructure they need to meet their regulatory needs.
Furthermore, companies may face challenges to debug and monitor as compared to a traditional computing model. To get a better understanding of how their functions are performing and to spot and resolve any problems, businesses can employ tools like logging and tracing.
This technology could be used to provide wide range of functionality including API, Storage, IoT devices related function, each new serverless function could expose vulnerabilities if not protected sufficiently thereby increasing the attack surface.
By understanding these challenges and taking steps to mitigate them, enterprises can successfully adopt serverless computing and reap its benefits.
In any organization, teams are focused on developing new applications and also maintaining legacy applications. This brings in the challenge of developing a specific functionality in a serverless way and integrating them with legacy systems. Developers may want to migrate their legacy Microsoft .NET based applications or legacy java applications to a serverless platform. This would help them to simplify the development, improve performance and save cost. Unisys Serverless solution will help not only in the development of new Serverless architecture-based applications but also in migrating legacy applications to a Serverless platform.
- What are the infrastructural requirements for a serverless approach?
Serverless computing is a popular and rapidly growing approach that allows enterprises to focus on their business logic. At Unisys, we understand that implementing a serverless approach requires careful consideration of infrastructure and architecture. These can comprise networking, storage, computational resources, and security. Some of the key infrastructural requirements for a serverless approach include reliable and scalable computing resources, secure and performant networking, and robust storage solutions. Cloud service providers typically offer a range of services that can meet these requirements, including serverless computing services, load balancers, content delivery networks, and databases.
To implement a serverless approach, enterprises need to consider several factors, including the choice of cloud service provider, the selection of programming languages and frameworks, and the design of the application architecture. For example, at Unisys, we work with our clients to evaluate the best cloud service provider for their specific needs and to ensure that their application architecture is optimized for a serverless approach.
- How can businesses secure their data using serverless technology?
Data security becomes a growing concern for businesses while using the serverless technology. At Unisys, we understand the importance of securing data in a serverless ecosystem and collaborate with our clients to ensure that their applications are designed with security in mind.
Serverless technology comes with several added layers of safety that can help businesses secure their data. For example, cloud service providers typically offer secure and compliant infrastructure that meets industry standards, including encryption, access control, and network security. In addition, serverless architecture inherently provides isolation between different applications, which adds an extra layer of security.
In serverless computing, there are two main types of attacks – application-level attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in function code and infrastructure-level attacks. Unisys solutions provide templates that adhere to secure coding practices. Each function should always carefully validate and sanitize all received input data before using it. Unisys Serverless solution helps software developers keep good track of the third-party libraries they use and apply the necessary measures to ensure that every function builds its own security perimeter. Unisys serverless solution also provide guidance on Identity authentication, fine-grained authorization, secure containers, etc. to keep infrastructure secure and safe.
