It’s always fascinating to get a glimpse into what’s next in the world of technology. Recently, the Cloud Foundry Foundation -- a nonprofit that oversees an open source platform and is a collaborative project of the Linux Foundation -- conducted a global survey of over 250 users and found that 22% are already using serverless technology. Nearly half are evaluating it. This trend is supported by Cloudability's research (registration required), which suggests that serverless computing is growing rapidly.
The term “serverless” is frequently used to mean cloud services or platforms that allow developers to be completely free of concerns around an operating system and run code that is only instantiated as needed and billed based on execution time. Functions as a service (FaaS) are a subset of the broader serverless term, meaning a capability that supports running individual code functions (not entire applications). The most commonly used example of a serverless capability (an FaaS specifically) is AWS Lambda from Amazon Web Services.
We know that use of serverless technologies is still in its early days and, granted, Cloud Foundry users are typically a bit ahead of the game with their use of open source platforms as a service (PaaS). Still, this number surprised me -- especially as serverless is being adopted in a unique pattern we don’t typically see, which I’ll get into a little later in this post.
Recent conversations with industry analysts confirm what the survey showed: Companies are adopting serverless at a faster rate than anticipated and in two very distinct adoption patterns.
Why Does This Matter?
Digital transformation involves building, testing and iterating on applications faster than your competitors -- specifically to meet the personalized, always-available, digital customer experience that people expect from the companies with whom they do business. Serverless technologies are another way to help developers focus on writing code without having to worry about infrastructure -- and companies are able to pay for actual amounts of resources consumed by applications, rather than pre-purchased capacity. Of course, serverless computing uses servers (physical and virtual), but these are meant to be completely abstracted away from the user. This means developers spend more time focused on solving business problems (e.g., faster app deployment) -- which means happier customers and more market differentiation.
