Cloud Tech Unravels AI-based Innovation with Serverless Computing

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Wednesday, September 09, 2020

Serverless cloud computing enables easier experimentation and supports innovation in various avenues, including AI-based tools

Fremont, CA: Majority of the innovations in public and private cloud space in the last decade were driven by massive corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. The most significant of the emerging trends in the cloud space are serverless computing and the appliance model.

During the early days of cloud computing adoption, companies considered cloud to be a substitute for colocation facilities and on-premise data centers. A couple of incremental benefits to this approach were also recognized. Primarily, it was shifting capital expenditure away from an equipment model to an operational model. Another was reaching at a service model where the cloud providers themselves take care of software updates. This remained true especially with companies like Microsoft and Oracle, for instance, if the company used Microsoft software, the task of updating the software is nullified, as the operating system updates are managed instances of Windows Server virtual machines.

As advancements in cloud computing rapidly increased, more companies took the leap and made the transition to a cloud-based Platform as a Service model (PAAS). The PAAS model delivers software and computing tools to customers over the internet. It is scalable, and reduces the up-front costs and allows the clients to focus on developing a software application instead of handling the hardware-oriented tasks.

To aid this transition towards the PaaS cloud, several public cloud companies have begun to invest heavily in building or acquiring serverless components that are equipped with pre-built unit functionality. These innovative tools enable organizations to test new ideas, iterate, and evaluate the concepts without taking a high risk or expense. In the past, only large enterprises with massive resources could afford to experiment with AI-based innovation. However, at present, startups and small teams within or a part of larger enterprises have access to cloud-based, pre-packaged algorithms that offer various AI models, which fast-tracks innovation.

Serverless cloud computing has made innovation much affordable and accessible to companies of all sorts despite its size and resources. The building blocks necessary for innovation, already exists in the serverless cloud, saving developers’ time and resources spent on making them. By figuring out how to use the options available in serverless cloud computing according to the developer's needs, explosive growth in AI-based innovations can be expected.