HOW IMS OFFERS COST SAVINGS BY DITCHING SERVERS

If you’re stressed out over increasing cloud costs, you’re not alone.

The Cloud was supposed to reduce capital and operational expenses for businesses by removing the financial burden of running a data center. Unfortunately, most businesses found that while capital costs were reduced, operational costs paid to the cloud service provider were often 3 to 4x higher than what the capital costs would have been. The cloud-native serverless approach that had emerged in recent years promises significant cost savings, thereby delivering a key benefit of moving to the cloud.

International Medical Solutions (IMS) specializes in software and services for secure, cloud-based image distribution. IMS CloudVue is a zero-footprint, Class II diagnostic viewer that allows clinicians and patients to securely review and share data in a cloud environment. For the past year, IMS has been converting CloudVue from a traditional cloud-based design to a modern container-based serverless design.

Containers are the fundamental unit of application deployment in cloud-native environments. They hold all of the necessary components and dependencies that are needed to run an application in the cloud.

Serverless is the approach where application services run on demand. Similar to a pay-as-you-go plan, costs are only incurred when there is work to be done making it a cost-effective solution for variable or unpredictable workloads.

Early movement to the cloud used a lift & shift approach that moved applications to virtual machines. On-premise applications were designed to provide good performance at times of peak load. In order to achieve this in the cloud, resources were allocated to handle peak loads whenever they might occur, likening it to having the same number of staff required for the lunch rush available all day.

This was followed by the move to containerization. Entire applications or large services were placed into containers without any additional ability to scale. Despite the adoption of a core cloud technology, the resource consumption of applications was unchanged. These container-based applications operated in much the same fashion as their monolithic on-premise predecessors.

Cloud providers have the capacity to scale dynamically; however, applications must be designed so that the addition and release of resources is transparent to users of the system. Using the staffing analogy, a shop can’t wait for staff to drive in from home.

Adoption of a modern container-based serverless architecture has allowed IMS customers to realize the promise of the cloud. This new architecture has enabled IMS to more rapidly leverage the latest tools and technologies being built for the cloud and the benefits that they offer – something that the cloud-native community continues to develop in order to achieve more robust secure operations at lower costs.

Our move to a modern serverless design has so far been rewarding. 50% of the CloudVue system has been converted to the new design, and real-world evidence has shown that we can process 4x the data volume while reducing costs by 30%. We expect even further benefits as our journey to a fully modern cloud design continues.