If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? If you make massive internal improvements to your business, do your end-users notice? That’s what went through my head when we went serverless at Dare a few months back.

We are an experience, design and engineering company. We do everything from in-store activations to digital transformation. We are all about creating digital experiences, one way or another. So going serverless surely seemed like a logical next step, right?

Obviously, it’s infinitely more complex than proclaiming ‘To the Cloud with ye!’ and patting yourself on the back for a job well done. As someone leading your business into uncharted territory, you have to do your due diligence.

What are the benefits for your business?

Straight off the bat, it frees up time you’d usually spend updating, security patching, doing server clean-ups and so on. Why? Because you don’t have a server to maintain.

Of course, there is a server - the term ‘serverless’ is best viewed as accessing a service rather than a product. It’s presented as an existing, established service instead of something you set up and maintain yourself.

The basic management now comes from your cloud service provider such as Amazon, Google or Azure, giving you more time to focus on other business needs.

From our point of view, one of the main appeals is the ability to scale up and down based on requests; if your web platform/application receives a certain amount of traffic, your serverless architecture can react on the fly to handle it, making it cost efficient.

Another great feature is its ability to easily split the logic of your projects in multiple microservices. These can then be managed by different teams, upgraded in a seamless way that avoids bringing a negative impact on the whole platform.

For established businesses, end-users most likely won’t notice the switch.

It’s up to you, as a business, to get clued up and let your clients know why this new infrastructure works. Because the switch and a lot of its benefits are ‘under the hood’, it may not appear that the architecture has changed.

However, there are great benefits to be had - don’t let them go unnoticed or underutilised.

If you can offer both classic and serverless solutions, then you can pick and choose what’s best for your client. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, and serverless won’t be the answer for everybody, but being able to offer it gives you a competitive advantage.

You’ll likely need proof points to win people over

You’ll definitely need hard evidence for more traditional clients: those who are unsure about how big a role technology such as serverless plays in digital transformation programmes.

We first sampled serverless solutions internally, developing our current website in a serverless stack with Amazon Web Services, because a) we wanted to improve and modernise our brand site infrastructure, b) we wanted to learn and experience serverless before offering it to clients, and c) we knew that if we pulled it off, we could use it as a watertight case study to show new and existing clients its benefits.

By rigorously exploring, we have gained solid experience in the technology itself.

So… is going serverless worth it?

If you take the time, then yes, it most certainly is worth it. But it’s not straightforward. It’s an entirely new concept, which requires a steep learning curve. You have to learn it, then you have to coach everyone else: internally showing your team how to automate processes, and externally showing clients how everyone benefits from this technology.

It’s not a pre-packed solution wrapped up in a box - it’s a new tool you learn and subsequently propose to clients and partners. It’s the same as AI, in the sense that it’s not the saviour of everything, it’s not going to replace us all.

It’s something we can use to further automate our work, so we can better spend our time elsewhere.

This is where servers and the market are headed. Going serverless will future-proof your business and, in turn, your clients’ business.

By adding serverless to the mix sooner rather than later, your business stays at the front. We’re ready. Are you?

Massi Vallascas is head of development at Dare.