Adopting a new architecture may be intimidating. Having to migrate all of your workloads over to your cloud provider can be time-consuming and stressful. I’m sure you’re wondering, “How can I benefit from serverless?” In this article, I’m going to detail how some of the biggest companies in the world are maximizing efficiencies within their organization using serverless technology! Let’s dive in~‍

Netflix’s Cloud Migration

Netflix is the world's largest television network company with a whopping 100+ million users, delivering 10 billion hours of video to its users every quarter. For them to be able to provide these services, they needed a strong and highly complex infrastructure and so they chose AWS as their cloud provider to make this happen. Netflix’s cloud journey began in 2008, and by 2015 they had completely migrated to AWS. Throughout the 7 years of migrating workloads, their monthly streaming hours had grown 1,000X. This is a HUGE statistic, wow! I'm sure you’re wondering how serverless services are involved, let me share just one example: Netflix uses Amazon S3 to store the thousands of files received daily from publishers, which then triggers lambda functions to break down the files into 5-minute chunks. Once the files are broken down, they get encoded into 60 different parallel streams that Netflix needs. As the last part of the video gets processed they get deployed using a series of rules and events. [1] [1.1]‍

Taco Bell Customer Success with Serverless

Taco Bell is one of the most iconic food brands in America with over 7,000 restaurants and when the Covid-19 pandemic started they saw a massive increase in customer demand for mobile ordering and delivery. This immediately made integrations with delivery companies work seamlessly. Leadership knew that something needed to be done to keep up with customer demand, therefore they chose to migrate their workloads to AWS specifically with a serverless first approach. As mentioned by Vadim Parizher, VP of Engineering and Analytics at Taco Bell, “We don't think managing servers is a core part of our business”, and “Serverless fits well with this model, having an environment with low upfront costs and a pay-per-use model it fits perfectly.” This is just another example of how powerful serverless can be for your organization. One of the biggest positives of serverless technologies is that it is very scalable as mentioned by Vadim in this case study, “The scalable part of serverless is the key reason we made this transition.” [2]‍

‍Liberty Mutual Reduces Costs, Improves Time to Market by Going Serverless on AWS

Liberty Mutual Insurance is the world's sixth-largest property and insurance company with $40 Billion in annual revenue. They still were looking for ways to maximize efficiencies within their company and wanted to become a global digital company. In 2015, they began their serverless journey on AWS when James McGlennon, Chief Information Officer, pushed for Liberty Mutual “to become more agile and customer-centric in the cloud”. Since then they have built exceedingly agile systems using serverless and have fallen in love with this model. For instance, a small team of four developers used serverless patterns in AWS CDK to build livestock insurance sales and administration applications in only three months which happened to be three months ahead of schedule. This team then used the extra time to create visual dashboards that added value to the application. These are just some of the great successes that Liberty Mutual has had from serverless adoption. [3]

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve talked about how enterprise companies such as Netflix, Taco Bell, and Liberty Mutual Insurance are just three of the many companies that have made the serverless transformation for their business. From a streaming entertainment company that needed an infrastructure to handle its massive scale-ups and customer needs. To a fast food powerhouse that switched to serverless due to its pay-per-use model and scalability. Then finally, the world's sixth-largest insurance company that wanted to become a global digital company has been able to do just that and more with a serverless first approach. No matter the industry you're in there is an opportunity for you to leverage serverless technologies on AWS. I hope this article has helped you understand more about serverless’s capabilities and the opportunities for your organization to make the change! Cheers~

If this article interests you, please reach out to info@serverlessguru.com to see how you can take the next steps toward your cloud journey and serverless adoption!

Sources

[1] https://about.netflix.com/en/news/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration
[1.1]https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/taco-bell/
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/liberty-mutual-case-study/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

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