Research: Serverless computing is becoming increasingly popular

Serverless computing where cloud providers provide the server capacity, activity and management needed to run applications at pay-per-use is becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise market, according to recent research by The New Stack’s cloud specialists.

According to the survey among IT executives of 608 large companies, serverless computing is already at half, 50 percent, the most normal thing in the world. Approximately 32 percent of the respondents indicated that no less than a quarter of all their large business workloads now run on a serverless architecture.

AWS Lambda’s serverless computing services are the most popular among respondents. Runners up are Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Functions.

Lack of clarity of the concept

According to the researchers, there is still some uncertainty about the concept of a serverless computing architecture. It is not possible to run applications without using servers. Servers are still needed for that. The researchers use the term serverless to mean that end users and developers themselves no longer need to pay attention to managing servers or are aware that their workloads run on servers. By moving the server architecture entirely to cloud providers, the entire infrastructure becomes an abstract whole for the end users.

Benefits for using a serverless architecture

The interviewees see scalability in particular as a major advantage of using a serverless architecture. This in combination with faster development times for their software. Another advantage that is often mentioned is almost obviously cost savings.

Serverless architecture is mainly used because end users want to have some kind of instant gratification. With a serverless architecture it is easy to say from here is my code, run it or here is my data, save it now. According to the specialists, they do not want to suffer any infrastructural delays.

Loss of control and its consequences

Despite the popularity of serverless computing, the research has found that there are still many doubts about this emerging technology. Companies and organizations have many questions about the portability of applications and data, the control over applications and application performance.

The researchers also warn that end users must take into account that they lose a certain control over their applications by transferring server capacity, activity and management.

They should also take into account that they have less influence over the responsiveness of applications, warns The New Stack further. The latter is because cloud providers tend to degrade the operation of low usage runtime environments. For end users, this can mean, among other things, that the number of resources available to them is limited, which in turn creates latency. This in turn has a natural impact on performance.

Finally, due to the lack of access or control to applications running in public cloud environments, end users may experience problems monitoring, debugging and securing their applications. All things to take into account, the report concludes.