Servers? Who Needs ‘Em?

The one constant over the past 30 years when creating, hosting and managing web services has been the not so humble and often temperamental server. Whether you’re running a website, email or web app you’ve always needed somewhere to store and run the code. 

While the dusty box in the corner of the studio is a distant memory thanks to cloud infrastructure, the server lives on, albeit in virtual form, with some companies and services even going to the trouble of owning their own physical hardware. While we’ve all been basking in the reflected glory of the cloud things have been changing again and in a big way.

Serverless computing is here. 

Serverless infrastructure offers significant advantages to traditional server based hosting. It allows applications and services to run on the cloud without any dedicated virtual or physical hardware. 

Major infrastructure companies like Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud are now offering the ability to run any application without servers. While none of the big providers release details on how they achieve their serverless services, or how they distribute and manage the hardware, the core concept is simple. Request a service when you need it, be it compute, storage or network and the platform takes care of it. You’re charged per request which means zero waste and an end to underutilised resources. 

Blutui is going serverless, it’s a significant benefit for the Blutui platform as it allows the team to focus on building out a great product by reducing the time spent on infrastructure management. What’s more serverless technology allows us to offer truly competitive pricing. 

With a little planning and some one off effort the day to day grind of maintaining, updating and provisioning servers goes away. Scaling is seamless requiring zero human intervention, this is a massive upside to serverless computing. We no longer have to deal with the tedium, complexity and specifications of servers and how they handle unpredicted bumps in traffic and demand. AWS deals with it and high availability just happens.

Companies like Coca-Cola, Amatil and Finra are already jumping on the serverless bandwagon but they are in the minority, the vast majority of businesses are either unaware of the serverless revolution or are mired in technological inertia. Serverless technology offers every agency client and the creative industry the opportunity to reduce waste, improve service and deliver amazing digital experiences in a way that hasn’t been possible in the past. 

At Blutui we’re on a mission to make boxes running code a thing of the past. Our guiding vision is to offer a great experience and a big part of that is harnessing the power of new technologies. We’re super excited about the direction things are going and we get a huge kick out of running our platform without servers, pure magic. 

Fred Leoo is Lead Infrastructure Engineer and Full Stack Developer at Blutui

Blutui is the web platform built for the creative industry.