It isn’t uncommon for the IT industry to witness breakthroughs every now and then. At the core of these breakthroughs are always the elements of abstraction, decoupling and integration. Through these elements, the industry promotes innovation and generates huge markets and new business models.
With serverless solutions, developers can extend their efforts on service login and integration. This substantially shortens the development period and minimises operational costs.
Revolution in this industry is often propelled by the advent of new technologies. That said, adding value to the clients is the objective of any kind of revolution. This blog enlightens you on why serverless is the future of cloud computing.
What is Serverless Architecture?
Serverless architecture is an approach to software design that enables developers to build and run services without the need to manage the infrastructure. Developers are allowed to write and deploy codes, while a cloud service provider provisions servers to run their databases, applications and storage systems at any scale.
It’s a method for executing functions, extending cloud computing services, and deploying software. In this type of deployment approach, the cloud provider manages both the servers and applications.
It’s not necessary to manage the operating system or any other server infrastructures when the user presents code to be executed in response to certain events. As a result, enterprises only pay for what they use, which allows them to scale up and down quickly.
Use Cases Of Serverless Architecture
A significant contribution to the adoption of serverless computing has been the popularity of cloud computing and microservices, as well as the demand for greater innovation without incurring increased expenses. The following are some of the use cases of serverless architecture.
Slack
Since serverless technology relies on actual requests, it’s essential for independent, task-based applications such as chatbots. It also saves money on operation costs.
Through Slack, an established, cloud-based collaboration tool, Amazon Web Services (AWS) sends notifications to DevOps teams using a serverless application.
Coca-cola
After implementing serverless technology in vending machines, Coca-cola has extensively adopted the technique.
To carry out a transaction, the payment gateway calls the AWS API Gateway and a Lambda function on AWS.
Since vending machines intercommunicate with headquarters for inventory and marketing, the option of paying per request instead of functioning at full capacity leads to major savings.
Benefits of Adopting Serverless Architecture
There has been a massive increase in serverless adoption in recent years, with many major companies using it in some form. Companies irrespective of their sizes are leveraging serverless solutions for the following reasons.
Expenditure
Cloud service providers ideally charge on a per-invocation basis, so you’re not paying for unused servers or virtual machines.
Scalability
Function instances are automatically formed and eliminated in response to traffic variations, within the concurrency limits.
Productivity
Developers who use serverless can simply deploy their code without the need to maintain any servers, which helps increase delivery cycles and swiftly scale business operations.
The Future of Serverless Computing: The Emerging Trends in The Field
Serverless computing is an entirely new paradigm in the process of deployment and development of software products. Thus, every trend must be considered in this context. It’s important to keep up with the rapid changes in the serverless architecture space since what seems relevant now may not be so few months down the line.
Trend #1: Function-as-a-Service is the Future
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is already an expanding market. While Microsoft, Amazon and Google are the frontrunners in this space, smaller players are slowly securing their foothold in the market. The impact is felt both geographically and in certain enterprise markets.
In fact, since 2016 the FaaS market has grown, on average, more than 30% every single year.
Trend #2: Security Will Improve
Security is an integral part of computing whether you’re running a serverless environment or otherwise. It’s something your business must focus on intently. That’s because securing your network and devices is a fundamental part of a project that you can be proud of and that you and your clients can trust.
In the serverless world, security isn’t always the priority. One study revealed that security is a problem for many serverless applications.
An evaluation of 1,000 open-source serverless projects revealed that 21% of them consisted of one or more critical vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, which could allow attackers to manipulate the application and perform malicious acts. Around 6% of the projects had application secrets, such as application programming interface (API) keys or credentials, published in their publicly accessible code repositories.
When more than one in five open-source serverless computing projects are insecure, then serverless clearly has a security problem that requires proper attention in the future.
However, this will change in the coming year, along two axes, which are push and pull.
- On the “push” side, you’ll find clients of serverless solutions companies demanding more from their applications and the software development teams.
- On the “pull” side, there will be more emphasis on security by the developers themselves. Focus the marketing efforts on security offers as a sign because the industry is also emphasising on serverless computing security.
Trend #3: The Future Is Interconnected
One trend we may witness emerging in the years ahead is developers using a unified serverless platform for the cloud, the premise and on edge. In this case, the same source code could be deployed, utilised and scaled everywhere seamlessly.
It’s already evident that cloud in general and serverless computing are both excellent means to scale an application rapidly. With practically unlimited computing power, or to be more accurate, unlimited at a certain price, it’s easy to grow with the serverless cloud.
A trend has emerged where applications are installed and kept local right until the point they need to be scaled. At this point, there will be a smooth transition to the serverless cloud. This kind of deployment will be attractive for the edge computing that the IoT sector is employing already. This will be a promising turn of events for activities that require high resources, which include big data analytics and training for machine learning.
If we look even further ahead, we’ll able to easily connect serverless applications between different environments. This could eventually result in a new generation of marketplaces where complex, ready-to-use software systems are available. This new generation of unified environments will enhance software analytics and monitoring and will let users explore DevOps methodology for edge computing.
Trend #4: Ease of Observation and Monitoring
In a study that surveyed the cloud computing industry and looked for insights into the specific challenges for developers in the serverless environment, two areas stood out: observation and monitoring. At least 27% of the respondents highlighted that monitoring their applications was their biggest issue. This overshadows all other challenges like being locked into a vendor contract or even migrating to a serverless environment.
Looking forward, we’ll witness observation and monitoring tools improve and not only because they have to.
Trend #5: The Future Needs To be Green
In recent times, awareness of the impact of our choices and actions on the environment has become more widespread. Acting locally and thinking globally have assumed greater significance when businesses envision a greener future.
Serverless computing ensures companies don’t over-utilise electricity. Additionally, with no physical servers and data centres that emit toxic radiation as they cool down, there will be lesser concerns about health and climate change.
Furthermore, the very nature of serverless computing and its capacity to scale quickly means that investments in server hardware need not be made. This is because the percentage of the investment would always be unused and sit idle. This minimised governmental impact by curbing energy use and lowering waste. It helps keep things a little bit more environment-friendly than they might be in a server-heavy setup.
Final Thoughts,
Considering all the promise it holds, serverless technology is still in its adolescence. It does much room for improvement. However, with ever-increasing needs for utilising, scaling and spinning applications and services, the cloud technology needs to gear up and serverless is the way to go about it.