Life Sciences And Serverless Tech. A Step Too Far?

By Jay Smith, Head of Product, Trial Interactive

After attending a recent developer conference for one of our vendors, the topic of serverless technology came up again and again. It is an innovation whose time has almost come, as more and more life sciences organizations start to rely on the powerful Cloud services that are now available, running the gamut from NoSQL Databases, Cloud Caching, Service Oriented Architectures and, of course, the hot topic of Machine Learning.

Serverless technology is the latest fundamental shift in Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities. An attendee at the developer conference defined it as "An application service that runs on the Cloud without paying for a specific server's uptime." It’s more than just a new pricing model; Serverless is a move to an even more granular way to pay for computing resources as utilities, shifting from server uptime to CPU cycles, memory, and network.

How do these important innovations affect life sciences? As the Cloud is slowly adopted by life sciences organizations, the speed bumps have been frequent; . the industry has rather special requirements that must be met.