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Serverless

▾ 1 MINUTE READ — CLOSE

Serverless is Where Application Infrastructure is Headed

Experts and visionaries in distributed systems believe serverless technologies are the future of application architecture — the next logical advancement after containers and microservices. And pockets of leading edge companies in industries such as media, travel and finance have already embraced serverless as a means to dramatically reduce operational overhead and streamline the DevOps cycle, while increasing scalability and resiliency.

“The future will be containerized and those containers will run on serverless infrastructure.”

— Brendan Burns, distinguished engineer at Microsoft and guest contributor on The New Stack.

Serverless functions, also often known as Functions as a Service (FaaS), are runtimes which execute applications but do not store data. They are the microservices of microservices, Adron Hall joked in an episode of The New Stack Analysts. And they are called based on an event that happens in the cloud.

In this model, organizations only pay for the resources they use — actual consumption — rather than pre-purchased services based on guesswork. The server management and capacity planning decisions are completely hidden from the developer, thus the term “serverless.” The servers are fully abstracted away. Instead, a cloud provider, like Amazon Web Services (AWS Lambda), Google Cloud (Google Cloud Functions) or Microsoft Azure (Azure Functions) dynamically manages the assignment and distribution of resources.

Serverless Benefits are Many

The benefits of serverless architectures are many. Pay-as-you go services have a cost benefit, but the true value lies in organizational efficiency. Developers spend more time writing code that directly benefits the business and IT spends less time maintaining old infrastructure. And it takes less time for developers to get code into production.

But the Serverless Ecosystem is Still Developing

Still, there are many challenges to serverless adoption. Serverless requires a new approach to development and a new set of a tools based on a DevOps culture. Latency and high performance can also become an issue in the cloud, as can monitoring, debugging and security.

The relatively limited ecosystem around serverless technologies, combined with the challenges of operating in the cloud, have led many organizations to approach serverless cautiously and in a phased adoption. Serverless code can be used alongside code deployed in traditional styles, such as a monolith or microservices — which makes it ideal to begin experimenting with for any number of use cases.


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Development / Serverless

6 Web Development Predictions for 2021

4 Jan 2021 7:00am, by Richard MacManus

Development / Serverless

Up the Stack: A Year-End Review of Serverless, Jamstack and JavaScript

28 Dec 2020 10:47am, by Richard MacManus

Development / Serverless

AWS Serverless Express Is All Grown Up Now

17 Dec 2020 3:00am, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Data / Development / Serverless

Stargate Data Gateway Brings REST, JSON, GraphQL APIs to Cassandra

14 Dec 2020 6:00am, by Mike Melanson

Microservices / Monitoring / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

Debugging Microservices in the Cloud

8 Dec 2020 12:03pm, by Emrah Samdan

Containers / Edge / IoT / Serverless

Koyeb Combines Functions and Containers in Its Serverless Engine

7 Dec 2020 1:03pm, by Mike Melanson

Monitoring / Serverless

Lightstep’s OpenTelemetry Extension Helps Make Lambda Telemetry Data More Accessible

7 Dec 2020 3:00am, by B. Cameron Gain

Cloud Services / Data / Serverless

Amazon Web Services Wants You to Migrate off Legacy Databases

4 Dec 2020 12:39pm, by Richard MacManus

Cloud Services / Containers / Serverless

Adoption of AWS Lambda Serverless Stalls

3 Dec 2020 9:01am, by Lawrence E Hecht

Containers / DevOps / Serverless

AWS Proton, a Shared Services Library for Cloud Native Resources

3 Dec 2020 8:07am, by Joab Jackson

Open Source / Serverless / Tools / Sponsored

SaltStack’s Open Source Future Under VMware

1 Dec 2020 2:00pm, by Alex Williams and B. Cameron Gain

Cloud Native / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

Lightbend’s Jonas Bonér on How to Minimize Cloud Native Complexity

30 Nov 2020 3:00am, by Klint Finley

Cloud Native / Kubernetes / Serverless

CNCF KEDA 2.0 Scales up Event-Driven Programming on Kubernetes

24 Nov 2020 10:33am, by Mary Branscombe

Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

What to Think About Before Building a Serverless App in Amazon Web Services

19 Nov 2020 8:05am, by Wayne Brown

DevOps / Monitoring / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

Monitoring vs. Observability: What’s the Difference?

18 Nov 2020 12:00pm, by Ismail Egilmez

Cloud Native / Serverless / Sponsored

How an Event Driven Architecture Drives Business Agility

18 Nov 2020 3:00am, by Juan Perez

Development / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

Quarkus Gives Spring Boot Users a Path to Serverless and Live Coding

17 Nov 2020 12:00pm, by Alex Handy

Cloud Services / Security / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

How to Achieve Ironclad Serverless Security

11 Nov 2020 7:25am, by Guy Podjarny

Cloud Native / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

Developers vs. Executives: Cloud Native Confusion Is Real

9 Nov 2020 8:53am, by Klint Finley

Cloud Services / Machine Learning / Serverless

Tutorial: Host a Serverless ML Inference API with AWS Lambda and Amazon EFS

5 Nov 2020 12:42pm, by Janakiram MSV

Cloud Services / Machine Learning / Serverless

Tutorial: Host a PyTorch Model for Inference on an Amazon EC2 Instance

4 Nov 2020 10:45am, by Janakiram MSV

Monitoring / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

Platform-Agnostic Tracing

4 Nov 2020 9:47am, by Emrah Samdan

Cloud Services / Serverless / Storage / Technology

Tutorial: Configure and Mount an EFS File System in Amazon EC2 Instance

3 Nov 2020 9:21am, by Janakiram MSV

Cloud Services / Serverless / Storage

Turn AWS Lambda Functions Stateful with Amazon Elastic File System

2 Nov 2020 10:55am, by Janakiram MSV

Cloud Services / Microservices / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

The New Multicloud: Serverless, Application Flows and Automation

29 Oct 2020 9:22am, by Mark Hinkle

API Management / Kubernetes / Serverless / Contributed

Making Kubernetes Serverless and Global with AWS Fargate on EKS and Admiralty

28 Oct 2020 11:41am, by Adrien Trouillaud

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