5 Serverless Computing Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore Today

The wheels of technology have been churning at the utmost speed since the last few decades; especially, the proliferation of the internet led the world into the digital age that we live in today. In such a fast-paced, growing environment, modern computing trends are needed to be upgraded from time to time. What turns out more crucial is that though technological advancements have become the need of the hour, the physical assemblage of hardware, equipment, and infrastructure maintenance needs to be significantly reduced. Serverless computing serves the dual purpose of providing technological advancements and reducing infrastructure costs.

Viola! No need for a server room or a roomful of infrastructure engineers.  Be it the use of AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions or others; these computing trends have become one of the most desirable and viable IT requirements for modern businesses. As per Forrester’s recent report - Serverless Development Best Practices - 49% of companies are already using or planning to use serverless architecture in the coming year. Among Application Development and Delivery (AD&D) in the cloud domain, serverless computing trends is the hot topic and below are the five main trends.

Serverless expanding beyond the technology industry vertical

Being on the cusp of the second cloud revolution, serverless cloud computing has brought an enormous change in the post-virtual-machine world. Across the globe, companies dealing in verticals other than technology are adopting the serverless platforms and frameworks at all production levels owing to its economic pay-per-use model. Further, the scalability of use has allowed enterprises from startups to MNCs to switch to serverless computing and reduce the expenses to a great extent. On technical grounds as well, the adoption of this technology has increased the versatility of IT architectures in the Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) domain.

The changing role of DevOps

Serverless providers and companies handle the majority of the operations and management tasks are needed to appoint an adept DevOps team that can manage the end-to-end work in the enterprise. The automated NoOps IT environment adds more value to the complete product/service production and delivery cycle. With cloud providers becoming a part of the virtual team, companies don’t need to expand their technical teams; instead, they can invest in value creation through developing new capabilities and thus growing their business.

Stateful applications utilizing the serverless paradigm

Support for Stateful applications using a serverless paradigm unlocks a whole new set of workloads that can experience the same benefits as stateless workloads.  Developers are able to seamlessly develop a stateful app without the burden of data management because it is now managed by a serverless platform and not the developer. This capability truly enables the development of enterprise applications in a cloud-native manner.

Kubernetes as the base of serverless infrastructure

Serverless computing platforms allow developers and coders to focus on the app, not the management of the infrastructure. There is considerable merit of having Kubernetes as the base for serverless infrastructure; it standardizes and enables vendors to truly offer a multi-cloud or a hybrid-cloud serverless solution.

Serverless computing growing beyond FaaS

The definition of serverless is evolving. It started with FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) but now it includes other aspects of an application. For serverless application development, there is a need for serverless compute but also for serverless storage and function-to-function networking. The benefits of serverless architecture are driving innovation so all these capabilities are available to the developer.  It is not only essential to smaller teams and developers, who want to develop their product without having to invest much on scalability, server maintenance, etc but also to enterprise developers who want to reduce time-to-market.

The new serverless vendors are addressing the limitations, so you can quickly get to rapid development and deployment without any infrastructure burden and vendor lock-in. The financial benefits and economics that serverless computing offers are leading to a visible growth in interest, experimentation, and adoption of the technology. The shift in the responsibility for running the IT environment from the organization to the cloud provider has been happening for some time, and this is all set to mark a new trajectory for every industry vertical in this digital age.

By Anshu Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder of Nimbella, Serverless Cloud Provider