The Future of IaaS
I had numerous conversations this past week about the future of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and how it is increasingly becoming the third option when building solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Granted, IaaS isn’t going anywhere soon, but based on the conversations I have been having recently, both Serverless and Managed Services seem to be gaining traction when you are building something new and not shifting existing technology to AWS.
Why would I choose Serverless over IaaS?
The biggest benefit I see with building Serverless solutions is that you don’t have any OS’ to manage. I wrote about turning off as many OS’ as possible earlier this year, and I still believe the value of OS’ is diminishing - quickly.
Additionally, with Serverless architecture you have an actual utility-based billing system, you only pay when your code executes. Granted, making an accurate cost comparison is difficult, but generally speaking, the majority of the time your compute infrastructure (EC2) is idle, but you’re still paying for it. Serverless eliminates this.
Why would I choose Managed Services over IaaS?
By utilizing a Managed Service on AWS rather than using yet another IaaS solution, I’m able to offload what I refer to as commodity-based tasks to AWS - think backups, patching, etc. By doing this, I’m able to allow my high-pricing, hard-to-find technology resources to focus on tasks which provide more value to the organization. I can embed them with my lines of business to provide business analyst type functions, etc. The goal is to spend less time maintaining our solutions and more time building the best solutions we can for our customers - both internal and external.
Don’t get me wrong, IaaS services, like EC2, and EBS, etc. are going anywhere anytime soon, they closely replicate what we are using to using on-premise. We’re comfortable with the concepts, and they allow us to create solutions on AWS to satisfy customer requirements quickly. By leveraging IaaS services, we’re able to quickly migrate existing solutions to AWS by using the “lift and shift” model. Were we just replicate what we have on-premise on the AWS platform.
For these reasons and more, IaaS isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon, but the organizations (private and service providers) who are going to be the most successful in the near term (with twenty-four months) are going to be the ones who embrace both Serverless and Managed Services.