For anyone who’s been hiding in an underground bomb shelter: Cloud is more than infrastructure commodities like compute and storage. Advanced services built on top of clouds — like serverless functions for app development — far from just providing a landing for businesses, can possibly transform them.

At last year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Sandra Stonham (pictured, right), managing director of technology and operations at DBS Bank Ltd, abruptly realized why it’s called Amazon Web Services Inc. DBS was using AWS infrastructure only, but the troves of additional services on top showed her the error in the bank’s ways.

“I thought, we actually can’t afford not to be building on this,” she said in an interview at last week’s AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Stonham and Adam Burden (pictured, left), senior managing director of advanced technology and architecture at Accenture Plc spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure below.)

DBS Bank’s chief innovation officer has laid out a new vision of the company as a “22,000-person startup,” Stonham said. The company is now obsessed with combining both tech and business agility to stay at the fore of industry innovation, she explained. This means giving developers and others self-service methods to quickly move projects to platforms.

Serverless and the cloud platform epiphany

DBS tapped the team at Accenture to help it refactor applications into cloud-native format. It is a bit of a science deciding the right method for moving a workload to the cloud, according to Burden. Sometimes it’s lift and shift; sometimes it’s containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). Sometimes, going fully cloud-native with serverless functions is the smart play.

“For the right workloads, you can get truly breakthrough results, benefits and value release by moving them to serverless,” Burden said.

Serverless functions as a service (like AWS Lambda) allow developers to build applications with elements even smaller than microservices. The granularity of metering keeps cost low, and rich on-demand capabilities like speech-to-text or image recognition allow companies to materialize the apps they envision fast, Burden stated.

“You do have to control the governance. You have to make sure that you’ve got some guardrails around that, but the developers will be incredibly creative with those services […],” he said.

Serverless has “allowed our clients to move from looking at cloud as a data center to looking at cloud as a platform,” Burden concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Amazon Web Services nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE