In the realm of computing, containers’ virtualized method for running distributed applications are hard enough to manage in large numbers. So what about even smaller, serverless functions that make up serverless applications? What are the chances of getting a swarm of those under control? Like container orchestration, serverless computing is squeezing startups to come up with products that abstract away computing complexities and rein in the sprawl.

Nate Taggart (pictured, left), chief executive officer at Stackery Inc., did stints at New Relic Inc. and GitHub Inc. At both companies, the development teams faced similar hurdles.

“The bottleneck was not figuring out what to do; it wasn’t the work in front of us,” Taggart said in a recent interview. “It was the underlying, kind of undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure.”

Taggart and his Stackery co-founder, Chase Douglas, began looking for a means to clear infrastructure drudgery from the plates of developers and operations teams. They came across Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda serverless function platform. They quickly realized its potential to simplify serverless application development and deployment and began learning as much as they could from serverless pioneers. 

“We took those best practices and built it into Stackery, which is now a software product to accelerate serverless operations,” Taggart said.

Taggart and Farrah Campbell (pictured, right), ecosystems manager at Stackery, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how consuming serverless as a managed service can speed up development cycles and improve productivity. 

This week, theCUBE spotlights Stackery in our Startup of the Week feature.

Oodles of functions under one roof

It’s tempting to look at serverless as an abstraction layer or a kind of “microcontainer,” according to Taggart. But that’s not the trend he sees emerging across the industry.

“What we’re actually seeing is people saying it’s a managed service,” Taggart said. “It’s me stringing together the managed components I need to develop quickly and deliver business value to focus on business logic instead of the plumbing.” 

Stackery provides a platform to build, monitor and manage serverless applications over their entire life cycle. The infrastructure is there, but users can easily spin it up with drag-and-drop editing. Users can very quickly build deployable application architecture out of AWS services. They can spin up correctly configured resources without actually configuring anything themselves. 

This can save enormous time for developers and operations admins. “I’m not busy trying to research how 1,400 services are going to interact with each other,” Campell said. 

Will serverless tug the rug out from under containers?

The serverless architecture market will be worth $14.93 billion by 2023, according to research from MarketsandMarkets Research Private Ltd., and industry analysts have predicted that serverless will eventually grow so popular that it will basically eclipse containers.

However, containers have had more hands working to simplify them and apply standards to them over time. There are tools like the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform and Mesosphere Inc.’s recent effort to package Kubernetes as a service, for example.

On the other hand, many have feared (and embraced) serverless computing for its messiness. At conferences like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, attendees can sense this in the serverless tent.

There, “‘standards’ is apparently a dirty word,” Justin Warren, chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., said on theCUBE last December. “There are still a whole bunch of foundational questions about what severless actually is.”

However, as word spreads of the cost savings people get by moving to serverless, it will be hard to halt the stampede.

Steven Faulkner, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, said his former company Bustle Digital Group cut hosting costs by about 40 percent by moving to serverless. “The initial results were even better than that,” he said in a post on A Cloud Guru’s website. “We had one service that was costing about $2,500 a month, and it went down to about $500 a month on Lambda,” he said. 

Taggart remains a big proponent of containers and feels that customers need not choose one or the other. “In that way, [Stackery] actually fits in and complements a container program.”

Shining a light on serverless in the shadows

There is one thing about serverless that IT leaders should know right now. People who work in IT are increasingly smitten with the ease of serverless computing, which is why most organizations are likely using it even if they don’t know it.

“I hear a lot of IT leaders go, ‘I don’t know if we’re doing serverless today.’ And it’s like, ‘No, you are. I’ve talked to two of your engineers. I know you are,'” Taggart said. 

With lower-level infrastructure jobs out of the way, the jobs of developers, operations teams, and engineers become much easier, according to Campbell. For example, Stackery has one engineer who is “coming out of a code school and is operating as if she’s a full stack engineer.”

If people are configuring and provisioning serverless resources in the shadows as it were, this could lead to some problems. Organizations ought to pull all this into their purview, or it might complicate their cloud strategy and increase workload on the operations team, Taggart explained. This is where comprehensive platforms like Stackery that monitor all serverless architectures can help.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE