THE EDGE
As a result, serverless can provide
huge cost saving to organisations as it
eliminates the risk of paying for unused
cloud space and it can scale to meet
developer requirements. This means
that if a site is having a particularly
busy day with customer traffic and data
requests, the serverless infrastructure
can automatically scale to meet this need
rather than the extra space needing to be
pre-purchased in advance.
One of the other significant benefits
of serverless is that it uses a lot less
computing resources and reduces
electricity consumption. When an
organisation hosts its own servers they
will likely sit idle, but running at full power,
for huge amounts of time, therefore
wasting electricity.
This is extremely inefficient and puts a lot
of pressure on the environment, especially
considering that some of the very largest
data centres will consume megawatts
hourly. However, by using serverless,
energy consumption can be adjusted in
real-time to suit the usage of the server.
For instance, the AWS Lambda computing
platform is an event-driven, serverless
computing platform. It is a computing
service that runs code in response to
events and automatically manages the
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Issue 04
computing resources required by that
code – sharply reducing energy efficiency
in the process. AWS’ Amazon Glacier offers
similar energy efficiency advantages.
It’s an online file storage web service that
provides storage for data archiving and
backup, with profound energy efficiencies.
Glacier is running deep storage in optical
disks at mass scale, which drives down
both energy consumption and cost,
arguably making one of the world’s most
advanced big data platforms accessible
and affordable to smaller organisations.
However, one of the key challenges data
centre operators will encounter is how
to make the utilisation, at scale, of such
energy efficient technologies easily
available. Fortunately, new open-source
tools have just become available to help
with this issue. These tools can be used
to bridge the gap between serverless
technologies and data centres efficiently,
with fewer skills required and taking very
little time.
Greener computing
Serverless is without a doubt a greener
method of computing and it could be
used to significantly reduce data centre
energy consumption. By following a pay-
per-use and event driven model, energy
consumption will flow to meet this need
rather than having all systems running at
full power even when they are not in use.
In order to reap the full benefits of
serverless within data centres, it is
recommended to look at open-source
platforms which provide the ability to
bridge the gap between the data centre
and the serverless vendors. This should
help make the migration from on-premise
to serverless as seamless as possible. ◊
SERVERLESS
IS WITHOUT
A DOUBT A
GREENER
METHOD OF
COMPUTING
AND IT COULD
BE USED TO
SIGNIFICANTLY
REDUCE DATA
CENTRE ENERGY
CONSUMPTION.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com