Arun Chandrasekaran (2022) discussed in Gartner´s material called “Compute Evolution: VMs, Containers, Serverless — Which to Use When?” compute layer evolution. These new application architectures have brought about advancements at the computational level, with the introduction of concepts like application containers and serverless functions in recent years. This has enabled further virtualization of the computational layer, going beyond just virtualizing servers. As a result, the computational layer has become more focused on applications, offering benefits such as agility, scalability, and automation.

In all industries software is becoming increasingly prevalent, and modern digital businesses are utilizing software to analyze data and develop applications to gain a competitive edge.

So how important is to correctly choose between VMs x Containers x Serverless? Is more important to choose correctly or to move fast? Is more important to make 100% sure when and why to use it? Or is more important to understand what scenarios they enable for business?

Cloud Computing has enabled startups to born and grow. An also, startups helped Cloud Computing to grow, to gain force and experience. Why? Because Cloud enabled these ideas to start with low investment in IT, gain experience and space with a reduced IT team but also scale fast and on time to increase exponentially the demand, and to not lose momentum. So Cloud was key to enable new business paradigms.

If you take a look at your cellphone right now the most common apps you use like Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, Uber, AirBnB and what they have in common? They recreated the paradigm on their industries, AirBnb revolutionized the way people travel and how cities handle the capacity of tourists and Uber became a concept and took to another level the discussion of having a car x enable you to commute easily without having the overburden of maintain a car, we saw “uberization” everywhere.

So, Enterprise Architects look for how to empower the business and as stated by an Cox, Noah Rosenstein, and Monika Sinha (2021) on Gartner’s toolkit “IT Strategy Template — Embedding Information and Technology in Business Strategy”, “strategy seeks to clarify how the enterprise will compete and succeed in its chosen markets or, for the public sector, how the enterprise will achieve its mission. Enterprises should have only one strategy — the business strategy — and information and technology (I&T) must be a core part of it. This means that the effort of creating an IT strategy must shift away from creating a separate document focusing on the IT organization toward creating a set of inputs, or key chapters, that are embedded directly in the business strategy”.

If we consider, for example, NuBank a fast growing fintech in Brazil, they used the Cloud to enable their solution, considered the software and the app as part of their core business and developed a strong concept, easy to use app and services, and made bank services more accessibly to people. So they focused on their product, first on VMs and at some point they had to start a long time waiting for EC2 to boot and start containers, so adopting Kubernetes became compelling for their business, because I made sense for the business agility and resiliency they were looking. If you want to know more access Nubank | Cloud Native Computing Foundation (cncf.io).

So Enterprise Architects are key to enable the company to achieve business goals and help to drive the best choice thinking about the Agility the company is looking for, resiliency and costs.

Serverless is a great way to start fast, agile and light, as you can start from code. But as the solution requirements evolves, at some features, modules, or systems, the flexibility and how containers can take advantage and use more efficiently the infrastructure can help you to achieve better results. It also depends on the team proficiency and learning curve, to make the company decide to shift from VMs to containers to serverless.

Rui Zhang, Kristin Moyer, Hung LeHong (2020) on Gartner’s document called “Digital Transformation Starts With Redefining Your Value Proposition” brings a very interesting case from TRATON Group (formerly Volkswagen Truck & Bus). They historically focused on selling products. So the company decided to launch a digital logistics platform called RIO to connect the transportation and delivery value chain. They explain that RIO is an open, cloud-based platform that combines data about tractor units, trailers, superstructures, drivers and orders with traffic, weather and navigation data to provide real-time recommendations. So to launch this new market segment, and idea to be fast delivered, tested and scale fast once the market requires and a cloud-based architecture was the Enterprise Technology Infrastructure that enabled their intents.

So the best Architecture and Underlying technologies are not only a matter of the best technical decision, it also considers components of team skills, how fast I can learn and move and how we can consider softwares can evolve and take advantage of new paradigms to achieve the objectives. Who could imagine 1 year ago that everything we know so far about chatbots would change so fast? Generative AI has changed the game, opened room for new use cases, and use what can be beneficial for the business is more important than consider that your application cannot change or move.