Overview:
Serverless computing is the tech trend that's got developers everywhere feeling like they're living in the future. It's a bit like magic - you write your code, you deploy it, and voila! It runs without having to worry about servers or infrastructure.
The serverless computing market has been growing rapidly in recent years, driven by the increasing adoption of cloud computing and the demand for more agile, scalable, and cost-effective application development and deployment.
Moving beyond traditional cloud and driving digital transformation:
Serverless computing is moving beyond the traditional cloud by enabling a new era of distributed computing that spans beyond the central cloud data centers. AWS Lambda, launched in 2014, is often cited as the pioneer and market leader in the serverless computing space. However, other cloud providers have been rapidly expanding their serverless offerings in recent year and are gaining market share.
Infrastructure is automated and elastic in serverless computing, which makes it particularly appealing for unpredictable workloads, not to mention more cost-efficient. Most importantly, serverless architectures enable developers to focus on what they should be doing — writing code and optimizing application design — making way for business agility and digital experimentation.
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) with serverless computing is the next stage in cloud computing. FaaS platforms enable faster time-to-market, by providing automatic scaling and load balancing, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure. It is the ‘future’ of serverless computing due to its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability and ease of use.
Growing IoT ecosystem is leading to the emergence of adoption of serverless computing. It has several uses, including data processing, batch processing, access to external APIs and data routing using only HTTP requests.
Current market landscape:
Some of the major players in the serverless computing market include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud Functions, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and VMware. These companies offer a range of serverless computing services, including serverless compute, serverless storage, serverless databases, and serverless messaging.
AWS remains a leader in the serverless computing space with a range of services including Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB. Microsoft Azure offers Azure Functions and Event Grid, while Google Cloud Platform has Cloud Functions and Cloud Run. Meta has also introduced a serverless platform called Functions, which allows developers to build and deploy functions using their own code.
Serverless computing has paved the way for a new paradigm in decentralized computing, which is at the core of Web 3.0. Decentralized applications (DApps) run on blockchain technology, making them truly serverless and eliminating the need to trust third parties for financial transactions and data storage.
This shift towards decentralized computing is a natural evolution from the first abstraction of underlying infrastructure offered by serverless computing.