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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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Cloud Native / Serverless / Service Mesh

CNCF Survey Snapshot: Tech Adoption in the Cloud Native World

5 Mar 2020 11:03am, by Lawrence E Hecht

Cloud Services / Security / Serverless

Data Theorem: API Security from Mobile to Serverless

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Question the Current Dogma: Is Kubernetes Hyper-Scale Necessary for Everyone?

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Kubernetes / Serverless

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Microservices / Monitoring / Serverless

Solving Serverless and Tracing Is Key to Success in Observability

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Knative’s Independent Future Outside a Foundation

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Data / Serverless / Tools / Sponsored

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Serverless

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Cloud Services / Kubernetes / Serverless

How AWS Fargate Turned Amazon EKS into Serverless Container Platform

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Why AWS Decided to Let Developers Manage Kubernetes with Serverless

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Development / Serverless

Instana APM Adds Automated AWS Lambda Tracing

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Data / Development / Serverless

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Kubernetes / Serverless

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Cloud Native / Data / Serverless

The CloudEvents Spec Seeks to Bring Uniformity to Event Data Descriptions

30 Oct 2019 1:44pm, by Susan Hall

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InfluxDB Now Extends to a ‘Pay as You Scale’ Model on the Cloud

23 Sep 2019 4:00pm, by B. Cameron Gain

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The Inspection Paradox: How to Avoid Bias and Find Customer Metrics That Matter

12 Sep 2019 1:25pm, by Nočnica Fee

Machine Learning / Serverless

TWIMLcon: A New Conference to Help the Enterprise Adopt Machine Learning

5 Sep 2019 5:00pm, by TNS Staff

Serverless / Tools / Sponsored / Contributed

How to Get Over the Serverless Integration Hump

5 Sep 2019 8:48am, by Srinath Perera

Serverless / Contributed

Migrate a Simple SAM Application to the Serverless Framework

28 Aug 2019 3:00am, by Fernando Medina Corey

Cloud Services / Monitoring / Serverless / Sponsored / Contributed

How to Avoid Cost Pitfalls by Monitoring APIs in AWS Lambda

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Context: ‘If Data Is King, then Distribution Is the Queen’

2 Aug 2019 5:00pm, by TNS Staff

Cloud Services / Serverless / Tools

Stackery CloudLocal Brings Lambda Debugging to the Laptop

1 Aug 2019 9:34am, by Mike Melanson

Development / Serverless

OpenWhisk Serverless Graduates Apache, Looks Ahead to Knative, Envoy and More

23 Jul 2019 12:38pm, by Mike Melanson

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