Why can’t computing capacity and storage be as elastic as electricity? Turn on the switch when you need, pay for what you use, and turn off the switch when not in need? Why do engineers have to worry about servers, capacity, downtime, storage, backups, and software to make all this infrastructure run?
According to AWS: A serverless architecture is a way to build and run applications and services without having to manage infrastructure. You no longer have to provision, scale, and maintain servers to run your applications, databases, and storage systems.
Our technology team has been implementing a serverless architecture for our systems and for portfolio companies. Through this learning process, I became increasingly excited about the potential of serverless architecture so I find this to be one of the most important and relevant use cases of blockchain technology.
Solution:
A blockchain economic system used for a serverless platform built as an open, peer-to-peer market for hardware and software execution and storage capacity.
- AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions are replaced with smart contracts that can execute complex logic that goes beyond a single application or blockchain.
- The gas fee paid for the computational capacity uses an open economic model that makes it more flexible and precise than any centralized serverless cost model.
- There are tons of excess capacity sitting in the cloud that can be monetized using a blockchain economic system that brings higher revenue through utilization to the provider and lower cost to the user.
- Requires no management of server hosts or processes. You can simply push the computation to any operator on the blockchain, and they will put the results back in the blockchain.
- High scalability and availability that dynamically adjusts to handle different loads by using supply and demand dynamics to change pricing.
- High reliability as the infrastructure cannot go down due to company or region-specific issues as blockchain nodes are distributed globally.
Blockchains are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the rise in serverless architecture because it has been core to their design and development from the beginning. Bitcoin/Ethereum/Solana is just software that is run and maintained by a peer-to-peer network that any developer or user can tap into by participating in the economic model without having to build or maintain the infrastructure.
In my opinion, blockchains are already the largest and most successful experiment of serverless architecture in the world, and we are just scratching the surface of using blockchains to create "the world computer". We are talking about blockchains becoming the largest and ultimate serverless platform without the need for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to coordinate the system.