An AWS and Azure serverless summary
In the race for "serverlessness", there is not one leader and one challenger: there are two leaders.
Now that most Azure (ignite, ...) and Amazon (reinvent, ...) announcements have passed and that this year is closing in, it’s time to take a wider perspective and to look at the impressive IT security achievements that both providers have been able to accomplish. In the Public Cloud coming of age this summer, I was super excited to claim out and loud that IT had reached a major turn with the advent of serverless and I summarized the keys reasons for that. In demystifying security part 1, I started to dive deeper and to focus on tenants isolation; I tried to show that providers had settled down to an industrial standard that would unleash serverless capabilities rapidly.
Now that Firecracker has been officially announced, I am able to disclose a clearer picture of how micro-VMs, the new gold standard for tenants isolation, is shaping up and how it compares with the situation in, say, 2016 to highlight the huge progress:
Keep in mind a few things about these tables:
- It is not a technologically and chronologically accurate design! (eg: Xen is still used a lot in AWS) It only brings about features observed from a customer’s perspective
- It is also not a technical architecture stack... Consider it a functional stack of components somehow arbitrarily (but fairly, I hope!) chosen to serve the purpose of this article
- Tenants isolation is far from being the only criteria to define an industrial standard, but it is quite telling
- If there are mistakes or missing points, please let me know in the comments I'll be more than happy to amend
Conclusion
? There is clearly not one leader and one challenger, but two leaders;
? Micro-VM as a mature technology is a huge enabler for serverless adoption at low costs, but True serverless is not fully ready for production in my personal opinion (see references above);
Finally and maybe most importantly, I let you admire the nearly perfect time synchronicity in the maturity of both providers. Architecture is an art, after all :)