Serverless Computing—The Promise, The Current State…and The Way Forward

With cloud becoming mainstream, customers and cloud providers have been seeking ways to optimize operational efforts and pay only for what they use. This need gave birth to the disruptive paradigm of serverless computing. AWS took the early lead back in 2014-15 with the launch of Lambda functions, creating a euphoria of interest in the IT world. So, what’s the promise, and where does serverless stand today?

While the initial hype has receded, serverless computing has continued to emerge. Cloud adoption has surged, but the true potential extends beyond cloud.

The promise of serverless

Serverless computing is an entire ecosystem of cloud services and functions, such as message queues, databases, logging, and authentication – all in a service version. It is not just Functions as a Service (FaaS).

The serverless architectural paradigm promises that all computing resource allocation, resource management, high availability, and fault tolerance will be handled by the cloud provider on behalf of the user. The consumer is not required to provision or scale any of the back-end servers, virtual machines, or platform services normally needed to run their code.

There are subtle bottlenecks and also ‘show-stoppers’ for its adoption, however, which must be addressed decisively from a technological perspective.

The current state of serverless

Serverless is not necessarily the right choice for every use case. Using a serverless stack is not always a cost-saving option. Certain workloads require substantial computing resources, which makes the serverless model less cost-effective.

The way we see it, there will be steady growth in serverless adoption along with steady decline in dedicated server computing. However, we believe that both these computing technologies will co-exist for a long period.

Moving to a fully serverless architecture requires an organization to commit to a cloud provider and know it well enough to gain the desired results. Most large enterprises are not yet ready to fully support this transition.

What is TCS doing

At TCS, we are helping businesses seamlessly adopt cloud computing and go serverless. Here are some examples:

• Serverless Enterprise Applicability & Sustainability Model (SEASM): Customers today are often uninformed about what can go serverless, how, and when. Within TCS, we have come up with a Serverless Enterprise Applicability & Sustainability Model (SEASM). This assessment model captures the current state, short-term goals, and long-term goals of the IT infrastructure. Business-specific needs are also considered.  Further drill-down gives details of what is feasible and areas for prioritization. As technology evolves, the model will also evolve. Using this instrument, customers can carry out a periodic assessment (once or twice a year) and plan a realistic migration to serverless.
• Creating serverless variants of prominent software platforms: Of all the prominent software platforms available today, only around 10% have serverless variants. We in TCS have started making a conscious effort to create serverless variants for the remaining 90% of the software platforms available. The objective is to address the open-source versions first, followed by complementary efforts of software vendors and cloud service providers.

The future of serverless

Ultra-agile businesses need serverless applications. Today, each cloud service provider is coming up with their own serverless technologies, which by design are mostly incompatible with each other. Also, a very limited number of software platforms have serverless variants available.

This creates an extraordinary gap, as well as a big opportunity. The initial hype of serverless computing is evolving into a more realistic stage, where customers can understand the risk-reward and cost-benefit angles practically. The dedicated server era has evaporated, and now is the time for serverless computing to seize the space.

Author Bio

E-mail: nandkishor.mardikar@tcs.com

Nandkishor Mardikar is an Enterprise Architect and a proven Innovation Evangelist at AWS Cloud unit of TCS. Nandkishor & team helps enterprises in full stack application migration and modernization strategies, solutions to ease out complex migration activities, and refactoring efforts, which helps save precious time and effort for customers on application migration. Complex technology domain areas of Integration Middleware, BI/Analytics, Big Data, NoSQL, and overall data migration with improved cloud native-ness are his core service areas. He holds 7 patent grants to his credit, in various digital areas across multiple jurisdictions. In his 30+ years of illustrious IT career, Nandkishor has performed various roles as Head – Technology Excellence, Chief Architect, QA Manager, Relationship Manager, etc.

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