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Image by Diana Gonçalves Osterfeld.
Anytime one can remove a step (or steps) in building and maintaining an enterprise IT system, you can bet your sweet Bugzilla that an architect or developer is going to take advantage.
This is precisely what serverless computing does. It’s a cloud-based application model that allows developers to build and run applications without having to provision or manage servers. Serverless enables developers to focus on writing code and building applications, while the cloud provider takes care of the underlying infrastructure.
Due to the continuing growth in complexity in IT systems, admins need all the assistance they can get. Serverless is coming to the rescue for a growing number of enterprises.
Some background on this sector:
The concept of “utility computing,” where computing resources are treated as a metered service like electricity, emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. Virtualization technologies, such as VMs (virtual machines) and containers, pointed the way for abstraction from underlying hardware in the 1990s and 2000s. Google App Engine in 2008 became an early Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, with features such as automatic scaling and pay-per-use billing, foreshadowing serverless principles.
Amazon launched AWS Lambda in 2014, marking a pivotal moment for serverless computing. This function-as-a-service (FaaS) platform popularized the “serverless” term and enabled event-driven execution of code, further simplifying development. Since then, Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions and other FaaS platforms have emerged from major cloud providers, solidifying serverless as a mainstream approach. Once the IT giants entered the market, that pretty much sanctified everything.
This nascent segment is going nowhere but up. It is experiencing steady growth, driven by its agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Estimates on its current size vary significantly, ranging from less than 1% to potentially 5%. Here are some key market numbers and projections, along with sources:
Industry analysts contend that continued growth and evolution of serverless will continue with an increased focus on event-driven architectures, security, integration with other cloud services, open source options and edge computing applications.
“In a way, serverless IT represents the closest thing to the on-demand computing future that vendors envisioned and promoted a couple of decades ago,” longtime tech analyst Charles King of Pund-IT told The New Stack. “In those scenarios, IT was analogous to electric or water utilities where customers and end users simply called up the type and amount of compute, memory and storage they needed for specific tasks and paid for the services they used.
“At this point, serverless IT is popular among developers (and their employers), and for other use cases and applications that can profit from capacity flexibility.”
Chatbots for customer support were an early use case, though serverless support for AI-related chatbot services and projects also seems likely to grow, King said. “Another growth area is streaming media, particularly live events. The continuing growth, uptake and evolution of live streaming should help drive serverless adoption for many years to come,” King said.
Improved serverless capabilities mean more applications can take advantage of the benefits of serverless, Carolyn Duby, Field CTO of Cloudera, told The New Stack. “Enterprises will be looking for guard rails to control costs, observability to provide insights on optimizing performance and cost, and application portability to move processing to the data in multiple clouds,” Duby said.
Scott Petry, partner in Cloud Engineering at PwC Consulting Services, told The New Stack that “there is a growing buzz surrounding generative AI in the software development lifecycle, with a focus on how automation can empower developers to unleash their creativity when building applications.
“Cloud and infrastructure technology companies are dedicated to streamlining the time-to-value for software products, resulting in a continuous influx of new serverless capabilities that developers can leverage without investing excessive time and effort in mundane tasks. Consequently, the emphasis will increasingly shift toward delivering valuable features that drive innovation,” Petry said.
Overall, GenAI presents a valuable set of tools that can streamline and enhance serverless computing workload production, from design and development to deployment, operations and optimization. With GenAI, developers and organizations can achieve faster development cycles, improved performance, cost savings and enhanced security for their serverless applications.
That serverless is a godsend for developers is already a given. Here are some key characteristics relevant to developers:
Security and regulatory compliance are factors in every corner of IT. How does this interplay with serverless?
“Serverless/SaaS provides you with a standardized panel of security functions, without you having to brew or make your own, which is where a lot of the problems tend to arise,” Adam Bellemare, staff technologist at Confluent, told The New Stack. “Good SaaS providers will follow all the usual best practices, such as encryption on the wire and at rest, strict access controls, and layers of defensive measures to prevent unauthorized access. The end user benefits directly by leveraging a mature security model, saving time and effort while reducing risk”.
Compliance can be more challenging because it varies between countries and business domains, Bellemare said. “Compliance can be modeled similarly to security, where there is a standard set of compliance best practices. However, ultra-specific compliance requirements may necessitate staying away from serverless, especially if you need fine-grained control over your compliance workflow. Serverless options may not offer sufficient features, and your domain may be specific or narrow enough that it wouldn’t be financially viable for your SaaS provider to prioritize adding necessary compliance features,” Bellemare said.
Serverless computing is poised to play a significant role in the development of 5G and other next-generation technologies. Here’s what the analysts say:
