Serverless gains momentum
The widespread adoption of Serverless and Kubernetes is on with more and more enterprises leveraging these innovative technologies.
Serverless on Kubernetes becomes the norm
2018 was the year that Kubernetes became the standard in container orchestration across multiple cloud providers. It is the top choice for Operating System and the top enabler for cloud-native applications. As Kubernetes becomes pervasive, it is also becoming the top choice for running serverless applications. Kubernetes is the perfect infrastructure for serverless. It enables easy development and running of serverless applications that take advantage of Kubernetes’ built-in serverless runtime features like scheduler, cluster management, scaling, service discovery, networking. This delivers portability and interoperability to any environment. This adoption on Kubernetes as the infrastructure for serverless allows enterprises to run serverless applications on-premise or in multi-cloud environments, without having to be locked-in to a specific public cloud service or incur additional cloud costs. Being able to benefit from the speed, cost savings and improved utilization of serverless while leveraging their own data centers, along with the ability to port serverless apps between environments (or even at the Edge)— all increase the adoption of Serverless in the enterprise and make it a compelling architecture not just to accelerate development of new applications, but as a compelling pattern for modernizing legacy applications.
FaaS sees large scale adoption
While Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Serverless computing only recently emerged over the past few years, 2019 will be the year of large-scale adoption especially for enterprise use cases. The growing adoption of serverless is driven by the increase in container-based applications which are cloud-native — an architecture that’s required for Serverless. The evolution of modern software delivery is such that the versatility and power of containers have accelerated the development of cloud-native applications for both greenfield as well as for modernizing legacy applications. Enterprise business scenarios that were previously thought of as impossible – such as for Edge devices, data in transit or stateful apps – are now becoming cloud-native. As cloud-native, containerized applications grow, developers take advantage of serverless functions to more easily perform a variety of tasks across a wide range of applications. Expect teams delivering large scale microservices transition some of these over to FaaS as a way of reducing the complexity of the application.
Serverless costs
As more enterprises adopt Serverless for large-scale, mission-critical applications, the cost of the serverless offering on public clouds and the cloud-lock in would become a growing concern. Companies will attempt to rein in cloud costs and ensure interoperability and portability by employing strategies to always use the optimal cloud provider without having to re-code an application, as well as running Serverless on their own private clouds. This last point would have a dramatic impact on their bottom line: improving their resource utilization and leveraging their existing infrastructure and the investment made in on-premise data centers to deliver the same developer experience and cloud operations experience as that of the public cloud.