Serverless infrastructure environments are set to become the dominant paradigm for enterprise technology deployments, according to a new report — Why the Fuss About Serverless? — released by global research and thought leadership organization, Leading Edge Forum.
Serverless computing allows enterprises to build and run applications without having to worry about the management or administration of servers. In short, it enables them to focus on simply writing the code for an application while the various cloud providers focus on the execution. With this in mind, the report claims that IT efficiency can be increased by up to 40% with a serverless infrastructure.
The report also examines how the serverless market has developed, making comparisons with the way cloud technology was dismissed in its infancy, only to become common in the infrastructure of modern enterprises today — history is repeating itself.
"Companies will have no choice but to adopt serverless"
The report makes the following conclusions about the future of the serverless market and its impact within organizations:
■ Serverless will significantly increase development speeds, often by more than 70%.
■ Serverless is an exponential change and it will take 5-10 years to become the norm for new application development.
■ Companies have no choice but to adopt serverless. It's not a question of if but when.
■ Sources of inertia to adopting serverless will include existing development practices and vendors. Some of these practices will include existing DevOps skills related to underlying infrastructure.
■ Infrastructure, containers and the more "operational" side of DevOps will become less important and less visible as serverless grows.
■ Amazon currently dominates the space and is likely to do so in the foreseeable future.
"Companies will have no choice but to adopt serverless," says Simon Wardley, Researcher at Leading Edge Forum and author of the report. "In the same way that cloud technology defied the naysayers, with vast quantities of applications, infrastructure and storage moving skyward, serverless is gaining momentum and will be the foundational technology architecture of every organization over the next 10 years."
He continued, "This report shows clear examples of where industries are already moving to serverless infrastructures, and reaping the benefits. It is time to start thinking about sunsetting private IaaS efforts over the next 5-10 years, and focus on developing skills such as DevOps that will be key component to running serverless infrastructure."
Leading Edge Forum makes the following recommendations:
■ Allocate resources to building with serverless and gaining experience in this space.
■ Engage with the serverless world, including sending engineers and ideally some members of finance to attend events/conferences in order to acquire those emerging skills.
■ Be careful of advice, especially from those who lack experience in building extensively with serverless.
■ Introduce a policy of serverless first, but do not start building your own serverless environments without challenging the reasons.
■ Start planning to sunset existing private IaaS efforts over the next five to ten years, with a view to moving up the stack into the serverless space.
