Photo by on Vince Fleming Unsplash Serverless technology is all the rage right now. It’s been around since 2014, when was first announced and But there isn’t much data about serverless technology users and their use cases out there. We decided to take matters into our own hands and find out more. AWS Lambda it’s been taking over the software development world like a wildfire. We conducted a survey to learn more about what made these companies switch to , what problems they were trying to solve with it and what have been the biggest benefits/drawbacks they have witnessed since. serverless All the respondents are early adopters of serverless technology, mostly small and medium-sized technology companies (19 companies in total took part), and they are all active Dashbird and AWS Lambda users. 2017 is the year of serverless adoption…so far We learned that all of the companies that took part in the survey This shows how recent the whole technology still is and how the market is still growing. started experimenting with serverless technology between 2016 and 2018, the majority (61.5%) starting in 2017. Also, the companies reported that of their current stack can be considered serverless. on average 57% (with the median value of 75%) Main benefits - quicker development, automatic scalability and cost reduction Easier/quicker development was the main benefit reported by 42% of the companies. Automatic scalability (32%) and cost reduction (21%) being close behind. See the graph below. One company reported that for them, the biggest benefit has been They commented it by saying: . easier capacity planning ”We now have the option to run dumb and less optimized code without worrying about overwhelming application servers.” It’s interesting to see that even though seems to be the main benefit that gets talked about, cost reduction the companies that have been using serverless, actually report other benefits as being more important and having a bigger impact. With clear benefits of quicker development, automatic scalability, and low cost, we will probably see the next Netflix being built from another garage somewhere. Main drawback - lack of monitoring and debugging So what about the bad stuff? of the companies reported that the main problem with serverless technology has been 53% the lack of debugging and monitoring tools. (both 16%) also got mentioned as the biggest drawbacks of going serverless. Deployment problems and architectural complexity It’s clear that serverless technology needs good monitoring and debugging tools and fortunately, there are already new for this. options on the market It’s also interesting to see that, although it’s been widely reported as one of the biggest drawbacks of serverless, companies didn’t report vendor lock-in as the main problem. 26% AWS monthly bill cost reduction Although there are some by companies that switched to serverless, the survey results showed that on average you can expect known cases of huge (70–90%) savings 26% (with a median of 20%) cost reduction on your monthly AWS bill. Photo by on Niels Steeman Unsplash 4 developer workdays saved every month Since quicker and easier development is one of the biggest benefits of serverless, we wanted to know how much in “developer work days” did the companies report to save. On average (and also the median) it’s 4 work days saved per month. It means that simply by moving your stack on serverless technology, you could save almost one week of your developer’s time every month. Imagine how much extra value could a high-performing developer add to the business when they have 4 additional days to spend on new projects each month! Forget the AWS bill reduction, because, given the Silicon Valley salaries, this is probably the biggest potential benefit for your business when switching to serverless. Delivery speed 77% faster with serverless The companies reported that (with the median of 50%) after starting to use serverless technology. the average delivery speed increased 77% This is a huge benefit and very clearly leads to , since it’s easier to experiment with new ideas and get them on the market in a record time. added business value and potentially more innovative products getting launched Photo by on Noah Silliman Unsplash Bonus: use cases for trying out serverless We also wanted to know what was the exact use case that . Here’s what they said: motivated these companies to try out serverless Easy API deployment by data scientists. We were trying to process raw data coming from a signal stream. Building scalable public API as fast as possible. Trying to move a monolith API to a series of lambdas connecting to our db through a connection pooling instance. To move cron jobs from an Elastic Beanstalk environment to lambda functions (and then to reduce the overhead of devops). Building an event-based system which is resilient, performant and scalable. Needed an API for my blog. CORS was the initial problem. A simple “take an image, resize, return to client” workflow. The goal was to create a secure cloud storage company with a pay-as-you-go billing model. Started exploring it for Alexa skills. Tried to solve the problem with auto-scaling. Cost scaling with use was a large benefit. Solving time to market with a low starting cost. Conclusions We at believe that serverless technology is the in the next couple of years. Dashbird next big paradigm shift in software development that will bring massive business benefits and major technological advancements The results of this survey also support that vision and with benefits like , it’s easy to see why serverless is gaining more and more traction and this trend probably won’t slow down any time soon. 77% increase in delivery speed, 4 developer workdays saved every month and AWS monthly bill reduction by 26% Disclaimer: the survey was conducted in April 2018 and it’s based on the data of 19 companies who are actively using AWS Lambda and Dashbird.io for monitoring and debugging.
