FaaS Selection Criteria: Little Desire for Multicloud
Easy, fast development is what people want from a Function as a Service (FaaS). According to our survey, 71 percent of people using serverless architectures said that ease of development is very important when considering a FaaS offering.
Fifty-five percent said it is very important to have support from their primary cloud provider when looking at FaaS. Contrast that to the 33 percent that thinks cloud agnosticism is very important and you realize that being multicloud is almost an afterthought when selecting a product. To our minds, this proves that serverless does not worship at the altar of multicloud.
Our previous article about hosted and installable platforms shows which solutions are actually preferred. Although AWS Lambda has a wide lead, many Azure and Google customers are eager to use their primary cloud provider’s FaaS product. We believe that not having to change cloud providers is makes serverless easy to many for may people get started using FaaS. Integration with users’ CI/CD pipeline is just as important.
Serverless does not worship at the altar of multicloud.
Less essential is integration with an IDE, indicating that developers do not need a comprehensive development environment when creating serverless applications. Furthermore, there is little demand for prewritten functions as only 16 percent said that is very important when selecting a FaaS solution. Given these findings, we do not believe cloud providers will get many new customers based on new product development efforts focused on their FaaS offerings.
As reported in our “Guide to Serverless Technologies” ebook, flexible scaling, savings on resource costs and speed of development are the most positive benefits people see serverless having on the software development lifecycle. Of all the benefits asked about portability (across cloud environments) was the least likely to be cited. In fact, portability was cited most often when users were asked about where serverless architecture is falling short.
Portability and control are being sacrificed as serverless users make gains with speed of development and flexibility of scaling.
Feature image via Pixabay.
