The faces of serverless world: (from upper left): David Wells, Yan Cui, Adnan Rahic, Elliot Forbes, Rupak Ganguly, Raymond Camden, Tom McLaughlin, John McKim. community is growing bigger and stronger with every week and although this field is fairly new, I have already noticed some serverless superstars popping up — Serverless people who are educating, talking, writing and tweeting all things serverless. These are the people leading the serverless revolution and I figured that their opinions and thoughts would give priceless insights into where it’s all going. So I contacted some enthusiastic influencers and asked their opinion about the future of serverless. Here’s what they predicted… This article is showcasing only some of the predictions these influencers shared with me, read the full interviews in unedited form here! Bold predictions — where is “serverless” by the end of 2018? More than architecture in some form or another in their product. ( ) 70% of all newly founded startups will use serverless Adnan Rahic focusing on building tooling around managing functions, team collaboration, observability, monitoring, distributed tracing, debugging, security, , and auditing. ( ) Rise of startups logging Rupak Ganguly We’ll agree that serverless does in fact use servers and we’ll move onto bigger and more important discussions. I expect to be wrong in this prediction. ( ) Tom McLaughlin Serverless will become more normalized throughout the community. The rather than data or messaging services. ( ) big releases from AWS will be more focused on Serverless ML/AI services John McKim We will start to see and the developer tooling around many FAAS providers will become much more solid. ( ) dramatic reductions in “cold start” times David Wells Who wins the most from the adoption of serverless technology? People who make the connection between , but as a means of producing value.(Tom McLaughlin) technical effort not being an end goal — “Consumers!” Yan Cui — “Developers!” Raymond Camden — “Everyone!” Elliot Forbes “Should I tell that reddit user that serverless actually uses servers? Lol, what? — of course I should!” The close second winner would be by not spending too much time on DevOps… unless they’re super cool and choose to use Kubeless. (Adnan Rahic) Developers! companies getting the competitive edge In my opinion, everyone wins — alike. (Rupak Ganguly) individual developers, small-medium businesses and large enterprises The . devs using it Having to not worry about scaling, load balancing, security patches etc. make serverless a fantastic way to build . (David Wells) robust applications with minimal DevOps Who has the most to lose? . While I do not see them going away, I definitely see using those options less. Of course, companies that offer both will have their bases covered. (Raymond Camden) PaaS offerings People and organizations who cannot adequately connect technical effort with value will lose the most. If you’re a company you’ll be (Tom McLaughlin) outpaced by the competitor that produces better value quicker. Be cute, but don’t be stubborn. The , and not giving a serious look at the benefits that serverless computing offers. (Rupak Ganguly) ones who don’t want to embrace the change The certainly will start seeing the effects as serverless tech gains more prominence. (David Wells) container world & tooling around containers Vendors that deliver technology or services for elements lower down the stack like servers and containers. For example, . (John McKim) Digital Ocean and Docker Will serverless computing become the norm? When? In some context, But not every problem you face as a software engineer will be solvable by a single tool. (Adnan Rahic) it will! Dedicated servers will still have their concrete use cases. Yes, serverless computing will become the norm within 7 years. (Yan Cui) Why do I think it’ll become the norm? It’s watching the Kubernetes community develop serverless frameworks. It’s watching Red Hat focus resources on Apache OpenWhisk. . Yes! The infrastructure and platform management communities aren’t stopping at containers The question as I saw it a year ago was, “ ” It was a question about what technology to adopt and competing technical views. Seeing the serverless progress in the infrastructure management space makes me realize the future question will be, Do you build or buy?… Which is just the same old basic question we’ve always been asking ourselves. (Tom McLaughlin) Do you adopt containers or do you adopt serverless? “Do you build your cloud platform or uses someone else’s?” We have seen the cloud evolve since 2009, but serverless computing is how the cloud should have been in the first place. (Rupak Ganguly) Many companies are still unsure about the cloud or serverless due to a lack of understanding. Advocacy and education will play key roles in driving Serverless to become the norm. (John McKim) Yes. But, this will take a long time. I think there’s a few ways to look at this question. One is — when will it become less the “hot new thing” and “just another option”. I think that’s becoming reality now. Serverless still has an incredible amount of hype around it, but in general it feels like That’s a great thing. it is becoming mainstream and less bleeding edge. The second way of looking at the question is in regards to serverless becoming the default for application development. I think serverless has some incredible benefits over traditional server based architectures. While I don’t think serverless makes sense everywhere, (Raymond Camden) I definitely see it as the option developers should check *first*. Serverless computing is going to revolutionize the way we build and deploy applications. (Elliot Forbes) Yes. in the future. At Inc, we are already seeing large enterprise companies running massive workloads through tiny lambda functions. (David Wells) Serverless computing will become the de-facto way folks will build apps Serverless How to get more people involved and interested in serverless methodology? Get the major players in the field to work together towards a common goal through organizing workshops, courses, and events. Proper education! Here’s an idea, just as DigitalOcean and GitHub have been collaborating to create Hacktoberfest as a way to get the community to contribute to Open Source, why not do something similar with the goal to educate people about serverless!? (Adnan Rahic) More people sharing real-world experiences (both gains and pains) of their own adoption. (Yan Cui) We need to talk and write more about it. Businesses and developers alike should and publish case studies for others to learn from. share real use cases The influencers and early adopters need to share code, examples, advice, learnings and their experiences. We need to , irrespective of cloud platforms, and evangelize the business values & benefits of serverless architectures to the masses. (Rupak Ganguly) unite as a community beyond our own products Everyone agrees — we need to unite and educate! I think the easiest way to get people started with serverless is to have them of their choice. Once they see how easy it is, they can often take that POC and expand it into many facets of their organization. identify something non mission critical to port into a FAAS provider Approaching upper management with a proposal for a big bang rewrite on any tech is typically shut down within seconds. It’s much easier to serverless tech into other areas of the business. (David Wells) start small, see the benefits from a smaller project, and expand The companies that are already on the cloud and run existing workloads on cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google cloud have an upper hand. They are , and more aligned to take the next leap to going serverless. already past the “Why should I move to the cloud?” hump It is not too late for the ones that are still not on the cloud — they should , and evaluate incorporating serverless technologies starting at the periphery of their systems. (Rupak Ganguly) adopt the “Serverless First” mantra The best serverless demos make use of cats. Anything else is simply wrong. (Tom McLauglin) Conclusion and gratitude. I want to thank all the people who took the time to answer me and share their ideas (and also the ones who couldn’t take part for various reasons but gave their well-wishes and were very interested in seeing it published). As mentioned in the beginning of the article, this is only a summary of the interviews, definitely go check out the full versions in Dashbird’s blog! NB: You can follow me in Twitter and don’t forget to check out Dashbird.io for serverless monitoring and debugging!
