What are serverless computing's most enthusiastic users getting out of the technology, and how are they getting there? They appreciate the ability to implement event-driven architecture, and to support their API deployments. However, they wish serverless had more portability, and would like to have greater local control of features and debugging tools.<\/p>\n
These are some of the takeaways from the currentServerless Community Survey, coordinated by the tirelessJeremy Daly, hosted and posted on the GitHub site. In serverless computing, all back-end work such as scaling, capacity planning and maintenance operations is handled in an automated fashion, typically by a public cloud provider, so, in theory, all a developer has to worry about is writing or integrating code for the business problem. Of course, one can argue that the term \"serverless\" is off, since there is always a server somewhere doing something, but that's another discussion.<\/p>\n
By its very nature, this survey is conducted among a self-selected group of serverless proponents, so its focus is on trends and preferences among those already well-ensconced within the serverless world. Accordingly, when asked about the maturity of their serverless efforts, 40% of the 582 respondents indicate their maturity level was \"high,\" that they are \"all in on serverless.\" Another 22% report their embrace is \"medium,\" that they are \"transitioning to serverless.\"<\/p>\n
Amazon Web Services emerges as the far-and-away front-runner in this space, cited by 72% as their public cloud computing choice. Microsoft Azure follows at 18%, and Google Cloud Platform with 13%. Accordingly, 61% report employing AWS Lambda for Function as a Service, or FaaS, which, along with managed services, form the core of serverless. Another nine percent use Azure Functions. <\/p>\n
The most positive aspect of serverless technology is its ability to enable deployment of event-driven architectures, as cited by 28% of respondents. Lowered cost of resources to build and support applications follows with 21%, as does the ability to quickly scale applications as needed (21%). The main issue respondents have with the technology is a relative lack of portability, cited by 23%. When asked to write in the features they feel are missing from today's serverless offerings, IT professionals provided a long wish list. The missing features leading the list include best practices, better debugging, cold-start management, greater ease of use, local development, and greater monitoring. <\/p>\n
If anyone is wondering if serverless computing can be supported within private clouds, this survey puts to rest any of those lingering thoughts. Serverless is clearly a public cloud play. Close to half of those responding to the question on public versus private, 46%, report that a majority of their production workloads utilize serverless (either through FaaS or managed services) in a public cloud environment, but barely five percent indicate this is the case with on-premises environments. A majority, 73%, report absolutely no serverless workloads even touch their internal infrastructures.<\/p>\n
The serverless proponents in this survey are a very busy and prolific bunch. Close to one-third of those responding to the question of volume, 29%, say they now have more than 100 serverless functions in production. The sweet spot, however, is still in the sub-100 range: 26% have between 11 to 50 serverless functions now running in production, and 21% have 50 to 100 instances. <\/p>\n
While serverless is being applied to both greenfield and brownfield applications, IT professionals are more inclined to leave their existing legacy applications go for now, the survey also shows. Seventy-five percent answering this question say it is \"very likely\" their organizations will be building a greenfield serverless application in the next 12 months, versus 34% indicating this is the case for their brownfield applications.<\/p>\n
Deploying REST APIs is cited as the most prevalent use case for serverless computing, as seen among close to half of respondents to the survey (47%). Supporting business logic is cited by 33%, as is single-page applications. Another 31% deploy serverless in support of their DevOps initiatives. <\/p>\n
Survey data is available for download from the site as an Excel spreadsheet or in CSV format.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
See the original post: <\/p>\n
What serverless computing enthusiasts like about serverless, and how they use it - ZDNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What are serverless computing's most enthusiastic users getting out of the technology, and how are they getting there? They appreciate the ability to implement event-driven architecture, and to support their API deployments Continue reading