Software - Screenless & Serverless

It feels good to review the trends once in a year. AWS announced lambda around two years back starting the trend of Serverless execution of code with auto-scaling. Then we have other platforms Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions to provide the similar capabilities on their respective clouds. What this means in a layman's terms is we can now execute a piece of code in response to an event without worrying about scaling the server along with load. We can create data pipelines performing certain computations and servicing requests as a lambda function. An MIT opensource project is extending this paradigm into a platform.

Recently, Gartner top technology trends for 2017 hints at the rise of conversational systems using voice/text to perform tasks on the digital mesh and the predictions go to almost 30% of browsing sessions will be screenless by 2020. The conversational bots performing multiple tasks without needing a screen demands for a careful interaction design with the users. Natural language understanding requires systems to serve the AI tasks on the server to identify intents and invoke fulfillment on the server. These applications are best suited for deploying them in the Serverless architecture.

From mainframes where the all the functions of input, processing and output are centralized in one place we moved to client/server mode, then to n-tier architectures, then to service oriented loosely coupled applications SOA followed by apps, APIs world of container deployed microservices and finally moving into the serverless architecture. That was a long journey of software deployments on the servers!

From a interface like punch cards, to character screens, graphical displays with mouse to touch screens on mobile and finally into voice enabled bots along with virtual and augmented reality is the journey of user interaction with the computing during my career till now.

As we draw close to the end of 2016, lets welcome 2017 with a focus on deploying software in Screenless and Serverless mode!