Add It Up: Prepare for an Onslaught of Go Language Serverless Functions

Over a quarter of people with serverless architectures in use or plan expect to write a function using the Go language (Golang) in the next 18 months, according to a survey by The New Stack in August 2018.

Sep 27th, 2018 9:00am by Lawrence E Hecht

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Serverless developers are saying to themselves, “ready, set, go!” Over a quarter of people with serverless architectures in use or in plan expect to write a function using the Go language (Golang) in the next 18 months, according to a survey by The New Stack in August 2018. The study’s complete results, including a cleaned dataset, will be made available when the Guide to Serverless Technologies is published.

Overall, use of Golang is just a third of Node.js, which was the first environment supported by several FaaS providers. The reason for the huge percentage planning to write Golang functions is that AWS Lambda began supporting Golang in January 2018. Google Cloud Functions may be following suit as they are currently offering experimental support for Golang. It would not be surprising to see Microsoft Azure Functions add Golang to its support roadmap since language support is a key criteria when evaluating. With Golang’s centrality to the container ecosystem, it appears that these developers are eager to take their skill set to serverless architecture.

Future articles will look at the number of functions used per application as well as frameworks that make it easier to write functions in other languages. Stay tuned.

Third-Party Data about Languages Used with Serverless

We compared The New Stack’s survey data to that reported in other studies.

The usage level for Node.js matches that found in a survey conducted by Serverless, Inc., which asked about serverless development in general. Use of Python and Go was much lower.
Based on functions observed in AWS Lambda in November 2017, New Relic found that more functions run Python than Node.js. We expect that these stats to change dramatically as the number and types of functions running increases.
A 2017 survey of Golang users found that respondents were twice as likely to be using a deploy a non-Go program to a FaaS service as compared to those deploying an application written in Go.

Source: 2018 Serverless Community Survey

Source: 2017 New Relic data about AWS Lambda functions

Source: Go 2017 Survey

New Relic is a sponsor of The New Stack.

Feature image: The Rosetta Stone by Thomas Quine, Creative Common 2.0 license.

Lawrence has generated actionable insights and reports about enterprise IT B2B markets and technology policy issues for almost 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies about open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work,...