On the Future of Cloud Computing

Simon Wardley, the advisor at the Leading-Edge Forum, spoke at 2018 Serverlessconf San Francisco ‘18 and broadly surmised the future of cloud computing. Wardley’s primary thesis is straightforward: compute is going to become a basic, universal commodity thanks to utility compute environments like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. Most organizations won’t need to pay for or manage fleets of expensive servers to run their code, power websites and apps, and process data. Instead, they’ll use hosted compute services run by public cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Many folks in the IT industry consider containers, a technology used to isolate applications with their own environment, to be the future. However, serverless enthusiasts think that containers will gradually fade away. They will exist as a low-level implementation detail bubbling below the surface but most software developers will not have to deal with them directly. It may seem premature to declare victory for serverless just yet but there are enough positive signs already. Forward-thinking organizations like iRobot, Nordstrom, FINRA, Coca-Cola, Thomson Reuters, and Autodesk are experimenting and adopting serverless technologies. All major and minor Cloud providers — including the aforementioned ones as well as players like IBM, Oracle and Pivotal — are working on serverless offerings.

Together with the big players, a whole ecosystem of startups is emerging. These startups attempt to solve problems around deployment and observability, provide new security solutions, and help enterprises evolve their systems and architectures to take advantage of serverless. This isn’t, of course, to mention a vibrant community of enthusiasts who contribute to serverless open source projects, evangelize at conferences and online, and promote ideas within their organizations.

It would be great to close the book now and declare victory for the serverless camp, but the reality is different. There are challenges that the community and vendors are yet to solve. These challenges are cultural and technological; there’s tribal friction within the tech community; inertia to adoption within organizations, and issues around some of the technology itself.

Confusion and Doubt

While adoption of serverless is growing, more work needs to be done by the serverless community to communicate what this technology is all about. The community needs to bring more people in and explain how serverless adds value. It’s inarguable that there are good questions from members of the tech community. These can range from trivial disagreements over “serverless” as a name, to more philosophical arguments about fit, use-case, and lock-in. Wardley described this as a perfectly normal example of past successes (with other technologies) breeding inertia to change.

This isn’t to say that those who have objections are wrong. Serverless in its current incarnation isn’t suitable in all cases. There are limitations on how long functions can run, tooling is immature and monitoring distributed applications made up of a lot of functions and cloud services can be difficult (although some progress is being made to address this).

There’s also a need for a robust set of example patterns and architectures. After all, the best way to convince someone of the merit of a technology is to build something with it and then show them how it was done.

Confusingly, there is a tendency by some vendors to label their offerings as serverless when they aren’t. This makes it look like they are jumping on the bandwagon rather than thoughtfully building services that adhere to serverless principles. Some of the bigger cloud vendors are guilty of this and unfortunately, this confuses people’s understanding of technology.

Go Big or Go Home

At the very large end of the scale, companies like Netflix and Uber are building their own internal serverless-like platforms. But unless you are the size of Netflix or Uber, building your own FaaS platform from scratch is a terrible idea. Wardley compared this to building a toaster yourself rather than buying a commoditized, off-the-shelf product. Interestingly, Google recently released a product called kNative. This product — based on the open source Kubernetes container orchestration software— is designed to help build, deploy and manage serverless workloads on your own servers.

Google’s Bret McGowen, at Serverlessconf San Francisco ’18, gave an example of a real-life customer out on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean with poor Internet connectivity. The customer needed to perform computation with terabytes of data but uploading it to a cloud platform over a connection equivalent to a 3G modem wasn’t feasible. “They cannot use cloud and it’s totally unfair to say — sorry buddy, hosted functions-as-a-service or bust — their developers deserve to have the same serverless experience as the rest of us” was McGowen’s explanation why, in this case, running kNative locally on the oil rig made sense.

He is, of course, correct. Having a serverless system running in your own environment — when you cannot use a cloud platform — is better than nothing. However, for most of us, serverless solutions like Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, or AWS Lambda offer a far smaller barrier to entry and remove many administrative headaches. It’s fair to say that most companies should look at serverless solutions like Lambda first and if they don’t satisfy requirements look at other alternatives, like kNative and containers, second.

The future

It’s likely that some of the major limitations with serverless functions are going to be solved in the coming years, if not months. Cloud vendors will allow functions to run for longer, support more languages, and allow deeper customizations. A lot of work is being done by cloud vendors to allow developers to bring their own containers to a hosted environment and then have those containers seamlessly managed by the platform alongside regular functions.

In the end, “do you have a choice?” asked Wardley. “No, none, whatsoever” was his succinct, brutal answer. Existing limitations will be solved and serverless compute technologies will herald the rise of new, emerging architectural patterns and practices. We are yet to see what these are but, as Wardley said, this is the future and it is unavoidable.