What Are Serverless Examples? Ten Real-World Use Cases of Serverless Technology

Serverless solutions keep attracting the attention of companies from different business domains. And it isn’t surprising if you look at serverless architecture examples. Giants like BMW, Netflix, Slack, and Coca-Cola use serverless architecture. And in each case, it drove significant benefits.

The beauty of serverless lies in its simplicity. There’s no need to provision or manage servers. Just upload your code. The cloud provider will take care of the rest while you focus on feature development. Moreover, serverless functions on an as-used basis, preventing overspending. 

If you are considering using serverless solutions, it’s a good idea to check out some success stories to eliminate the doubts. We’re going to share some in this article. The Serverless team completed over 220 cloud projects so far. But for now, let’s focus on the world-famous companies and products that inspire innovation and are great examples for anyone to follow. 

Serverless architecture becomes a game-changer when you implement it right. It simplifies the way companies build and deploy applications. It remains cost-efficient while providing flexibility and scalability to adjust to the software’s needs as necessary. Let’s see how it works in practice, recalling real-world serverless computing examples. 

Equinox Media: Infrastructure and Analytics for Wellness Apps

Let’s start with AWS serverless architecture examples. Equinox Media utilizes a data lake strategy and a combination of AWS solutions to power VARIS, their fitness service launched in 2020. The desire to balance scalability and cost-effectiveness dictated the decision to go serverless. 

VARIS relies on ML suggestions for scaling to deliver better user experiences. Equinox Media gets huge amounts of reliable raw data and sends it for analysis. It allows the company to prevent performance bottlenecks. The service uses activity ingestion, data lake, activities API, and recommendation API to perfect the scalability algorithms. 

BMW: Event-Driven Analytics for ML Modelling

The BMW Group is another name on the list of serverless examples. The corporation faced challenges managing the vast amount of information constantly received from its ConnectedDrive backend server. At some point, the number of daily requests to process reached over a billion. 

To handle the data flow, BMW came up with the Cloud Data Hub – a centralized data lake that collects, manages, and analyzes evidence to create ML models. The processing capabilities aren’t limited by server space. Working with this anonymized evidence from numerous vehicle systems allowed for resolving issues proactively and innovating faster. 

Major League Baseball: Accurate Real-Time Data Updates

There are serverless framework examples in the sports tech, too. MBL’s Statcast allows users to search for information based on numerous variables: pitch velocity, pitch type, season type, specific event, and player name. It also provides precise real-time baseball statistics and insights into player movements during baseball games across North America.

The serverless architecture supports substantial data flows and provides tools for their analysis. To be more specific, AWS Lambda allows for handling varying match frequencies. It can range from 1-2 to 12-15 games daily. Meanwhile, the company doesn’t need to pay for the infrastructure during the off-season.

Coca-Cola: IoT-Powered Vending Machines

Coca-Cola is also among the serverless functions examples. Their adoption of cloud-based solutions started in 2016 with the launch of a smart vending machine line called Freestyle. It lets a customer order and pay for their drinks online. The machines offering a touchless experience became extremely popular during the pandemic. 

The anticipated usage was 30 million monthly requests, but it went up to 80 million actual transactions at some point. Meanwhile, using serverless architecture for scaling and handling almost three times more users allowed cutting costs significantly: from $13,000 to $4,500 per machine. The company plans to transition to fully serverless in the long run.

Autodesk: Fast App Deployment and Huge Savings

Autodesk is one more AWS serverless use case. Their experience reminds businesses that there’s always room for innovation. Autodesk has a platform called Tailor for creating customized accounts. The firm managed to roll it out in two weeks with two team members on board. Automating complicated but typical tasks with AWS Lambda played a key role. 

In addition to a quick launch, the company experienced several other benefits. The expense of creating an account dropped from $500 to $5. Naturally, it resulted in significant operational cost savings, but not only this. Using AWS services simplified serverless security updates and configuration management for Autodesk.

Slack: Dynamic and Responsive Chatbots

Slack is also among serverless architecture examples. Chatbots play a vital role in the interactions within the platform. Users can connect existing solutions or their own custom bots to enhance the tool’s efficiency. Such chatbots can respond to user queries, automate tasks, and much more to facilitate collaboration. 

User interactions can vary considerably throughout the day. The serverless approach allows Slack to allocate computing resources dynamically – exactly when there’s a need for scaling. Besides being convenient, this ability aligns perfectly with the company’s user-centric philosophy and reduces operational expenses. 

Netflix: Scalable On-Demand Media Delivery

Netflix is another widely used serverless website example. AWS Lambda helped Netflix maintain top-notch performance at critical usage periods during the lockdowns. It also automates some tasks (media file encoding, backup checks, instance deployments), ensures file validation, and tracks if all system components follow the set rules.

However, the adoption of serverless by Netflix started long before the pandemic. For instance, its Dynamic Scripting Platform, powered by serverless architecture, handles real-time modifications, provisioning, and end-user delivery. It’s critical for entertainment platforms with a vast and diverse user base. 

IDEXX: Data-Driven Decision-Making 

VetConnect PLUS by IDEXX is one of the exciting serverless examples. It uses both Google serverless tech and AWS solutions. The tool fetches diagnostic summaries based on consolidated information from a massive amount of sources. These include over 250 million pets, six billion invoices, and 600 million medications, making around 30 TB of data. 

Migrating to serverless allowed the platform to increase availability and eliminate performance bottlenecks. As a result, veterinarians get an opportunity to provide more accurate and prompt test results. Veterinarians have constant access to a ton of evidence-based results and references while the company is ready for variable workloads.

Slack: One More Serverless Bot

marbot receives special attention on today’s list. It’s a tool for simple AWS monitoring – closing over 7,500 alerts each week and critical for DevOps teams. marbot serves as a bridge between the two platforms, sending AWS notifications directly to Slack. Thus, it facilitates managing serverless infrastructure while also showcasing its scalability benefits. 

Amazon Polly: Audiobooks and Text-to-Speech

Amazon Polly wraps up our selection of AWS serverless architecture examples. The service transforms text into lifelike speech with 47 voices in 24 languages. Perfecting a solution like this implies processing tons of data to build proper ML models. And it would be odd if the application didn’t utilize the company’s own AWS CloudFormation. 

Currently, Amazon Polly ensures fast response times for real-time interactive dialogues, allowing caching and saving audio files for offline use. Powered by serverless technologies, it combines advanced features with ease of exploitation. And that’s a perfect mix for users. 

As you can see, no serverless template or pattern can signal you’re viewing or interacting with a platform built on this technology. There is no universal scenario or action plan for using serverless solutions. But at least we have a list of best practices that can be helpful for your team.

• Pay attention to security. Limit function privileges, enabling access only to necessary services. Ensure that sensitive data isn’t scattered across the infrastructure. Use virtual private clouds. Avoid embedding long-term credentials in code.
• Ensure high availability. Configure the cloud to avoid a single point of failure and withstand unforeseen request spikes. Implement retry logic to manage failures effectively. 
• Address performance concerns. Allocate more memory and schedule regular pings to minimize the impact of cold starts. Set up caching to store frequently requested data. Optimize code and dependencies to improve initialization times. 
• Consider sustainability. Optimize serverless applications for energy and resource efficiency. Align your design decisions with environmental goals and aim to run workloads in renewable energy zones.
• Strive for operational excellence. Seek a balance between your business objectives and the application’s health and performance. Centralized monitoring and data correlation will be helpful. 
• Plan for serverless cost optimizationr. Define the best performance vs expenses scenario for your application. Optimize function memory size based on your needs to prevent overpayment.
• Monitor, analyze, and update. Plan for potential failures and have error-handling strategies in place. Pay attention to vulnerabilities or risk-prone areas. Keep track of updates and improvements from your serverless provider.

Remember that scalability, reduced management, and efficient resource utilization don’t come with serverless technology by default. Following the mentioned practices helps teams build and maintain a reliable serverless architecture and fully use its advantages. 

We have rich experience working with diverse serverless computing use cases, business domains, challenges, and technologies. After ten years in cloud development and over 200 projects, we can say confidently that we know how to address serverless implementation issues efficiently and help businesses keep up with the ever-changing market. 

We work with small and medium businesses, as well as enterprises. If your request entails going serverless for startups, we’ll help navigate unpredictability. With the right tools and expertise, building a reliable, scalable, and low-maintenance system is possible. You can be sure to get a functional, future-ready platform. 

The Serverless team is ISO-certified and trained by top cloud providers. We have a proven track record with projects on migration, architecture improvement, rebuilding, and designing serverless infrastructure for various platforms. And we’ll be glad to answer your questions regarding your case and its challenges.

Exploring real-world serverless architecture use cases helps better understand how it drives innovation and efficiency and what benefits it can offer you. Serverless technology reshapes the approach to application architecture. It makes it more flexible and prone to adjustments, which are critical for keeping up with the dynamic tech market and demanding users. 

The businesses mentioned in this article prove the effectiveness of serverless architecture across various industries. It can handle dynamic workloads, improve response times, and optimize teams’ workloads. Meanwhile, it remains cost-efficient or even cuts the company’s expenses significantly. Seeking advice from leading cloud migration consulting companies can further enhance the transition to serverless, ensuring a smooth and informed migration process. Undoubtedly, serverless solutions sound like something worth a try.

The future of cloud computing, with its continuous evolution, further solidifies the pivotal role of serverless architectures in next-generation digital solutions.

To unlock the full potential of serverless architectures, however, you need to consider context, specific business needs, and misconceptions that often remain in the shade of benefits. But if you have a good tech team to back you up, there’s no need to worry.