The rise of serverless technology as part of a broader cloud application modernization movement has been going on for a few years. But the serverless romance has just sparked up, as the execution rate of functions-as-a-service or FaaS approaches such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda has spiked dramatically over the last year.

Average weekly invocations of Lambda functions jumped by 209% between June and December of 2019, with an impressive “holiday spike” of additional transactional use showing at the end of the year, according to For the Love of Serverless, a February 2020 study of AWS customers by cloud observability provider New Relic Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Whether this uptick in volume is an indicator of increased use among an existing set of early customers or the beginning of a real hockey-stick curve in the number of dev shops employing serverless, it’s clear that new technical talent will need to be cultivated to explore this change.

Lambda evolves with deepening developer skillsets

“Understanding how to deploy serverless applications is a challenge,” Dave Townsend, principal software engineer in the Innovation & Architecture group at Matson Inc., said in a related interview. “There is really no separation of code and infra now, so that takes some getting used to. It is still really early in this game, and I think as a community we’re evolving.”

Teams are inherently designing applications with the decoupling of logic and state in mind. The survey also shows that by quantity, the vast majority of functions customers monitored were various versions of Node.js (52.5%) and Python (35.8%) code, with lean code sizes and shorter invocation times.

Several longer-duration or larger-sized memory functions noted in the serverless survey were attributed to oft-invoked Java coded functions, which were not always able to start up at the responsive under-100-millisecond time frames seen for other languages.

“We measured a number around function duration, and had a lively discussion about why Java runtimes could be taking longer to run,” said Andrew Tunall, general manager of New Relic’s Serverless & Emerging Cloud Services.

“AWS could have been dogmatic about the technology, but instead they announced pre-provisioning functionality to customers with latency requirements,” he said. “It’s meaningful that they meet the customer halfway to allow them to use functions as a service.”

Farrah Campbell, ecosystems director at Stackery, said in the report that in the past year, many serverless platform issues have been addressed, including provisioning of “warm” functions and improved scalability when attached to virtual networks. “Now that serverless can handle almost all use cases, the biggest technical challenges will continue to be developing the right workflows and tools for a broader developer base to adopt serverless,” she said.

What’s good for startups is good for enterprises

You can see how many companies get hooked — usually on a new-application development exercise that is designed by nature to make rapid procedural calls to FaaS. Perhaps it’s accompanied by other adjacent serverless technologies for data management and observability, delivering a highly successful and scalable result at a very affordable cost.

The combination of serverless architecture and stateless code such as AWS Lambda has given us the ability to create massive scale for our platform in a cost-effective way, which incentivizes us to find creative ways to use these platform services,” said Michael Semick, chief technology officer of startup Blueocean.ai. “It’s attractive not having to maintain servers and operating systems, but the downside is tracking and organizing the growing number of Lambdas, which can create complexity for automated deployments as well as security and governance.”

Many customers with existing application suites cite dependencies and technical debt as limiting factors to companywide adoption, but the business case still needs to be justified first.

“It is often challenging (or even impossible) to show upper management a convincing like-for-like cost comparison of an on-prem or hosted environment versus a serverless estate,” said Sheen Brisals, serverless solution architect at The LEGO Group. ” Without this direct comparison, it often delays the migration to serverless or management buy-in into serverless.”

Pervasive rise among peers in the category

All of this adoption data isn’t simply coming from one place. Rival application performance management provider Datadog also recently produced its own State of Serverless report, demonstrating similar hockey-stick growth results for Lambdas. The marquee statistic: Some 50% of its AWS customer shops are also exercising serverless functions.

But the most surprising result of that survey? The greatest rate of usage for Lambda functions is weighted toward large, enterprise-scale environments. So it’s really not all startups singing serverless praises.

According to Forrester, nearly 50% of companies are either using or planning to switch to serverless architecture within the next year, as cited in the recent New Relic report.

AWS can be expected to lead this charge handily, but similarly strong rises in Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions should also be expected, especially for their ideal customers and workload types.

The Intellyx take

The realization that “serverless isn’t really serverless” is old hat. Obviously, even an ephemeral function that lives in a container in a cloud for less than a second is still running on a server somewhere. Just not one you’d manage.

This high-growth takeaway is leading enterprise applications along the continuum toward an atomicity of function, as virtualized cloud instances of infrastructure gave way to hundreds of services and containers, even more orchestrated Kubernetes clusters. All of them may be calling on many thousands of Lambda compute functions, as well as other serverless instances such as AWS DynamoDB for data persistence.

The initial successes of serverless may cause companies to embark on more daring net-new re-architectures and replacements of existing legacy dependencies.

Yes, there will always be dependencies. But at this price per function, what’s stopping your company or team from at least flirting with FaaS?

Jason English is principal analyst and chief marketing officer at Intellyx LLC, an analyst firm that advises enterprises on their digital transformation initiatives and publishes the weekly Cortex and BrainCandy newsletters. (* Disclosure: New Relic is an Intellyx client and Microsoft is a former customer. None of the other companies mentioned is an Intellyx customer.)

Image: Changwan Han/Flickr