The pay-per-invocation model of serverless is such an under-appreciated superpower. It lets you work out the cost of each user transaction and understand the return on investment of features. It can even open the door for new business models and pricing strategies once you embrace it.

A lot of the discussions around serverless has been about the benefits it brings to the table with regards to DevOps - more infrastructure automation, scalability and resilience out-of-the-box. Developers love it because they can offload even more undifferentiated heavy-lifting to their cloud vendors, and they can focus their energy on building the things their users want. Businesses benefit hugely too because they have happier developers who can deliver value faster!

But the true power of the serverless paradigm, for the business, is the pay-per-invocation model. It allows them to finally understand the cost of user transactions, and calculate the return on investment of features. And if you embrace this superpower then it can even open the door to an entirely new business model built around pay-per-transaction and give your business the competitive advantage over your rivals.

Yan is an experienced engineer who has worked with AWS for nearly 10 years. He has been an architect and lead developer with a variety of industries ranging from investment banks, e-commence to mobile