Serverless computing was pioneered in the early 2000s. But it was Amazon Web Services Inc.’s introduction of AWS Lambda in 2014 that brought the technology to the attention of enterprise information technology leaders. Companies saw the benefits of handing the costs and hassle of maintaining and managing servers over to a cloud provider, but adoption was hampered by a major confidence gap.

As serverless matures, that gap is closing. The global market size is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 22.7% over the next five years to reach a market valuation of $21.1 billion in 2025. This growth comes as companies shift from on-premises data centers to hybrid cloud models, with pay-as-you-go financial structures making serverless a simpler and more cost-effective option than upfront expenditure in hardware.

“We’ve seen a dramatic change in the last six months,” said Erez Berkner (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Lumigo Ltd. “The main change is organizations that used to play around with serverless, that used to do non-business critical usage of serverless … all of a sudden they got the confidence to do [serverless] with their business-critical applications in production.”

Berkner spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in advance of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed the benefits of going serverless and why enterprises now have the confidence to use serverless architecture for mission-critical workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

API-based services are the Lego bricks of cloud

A modern definition of serverless expands beyond functional services like AWS Lambda, according to Berkner. Storage of the service, as provided by AWS F3; data to service from Snowflake Inc.’s Data Cloud or Amazon DynamoDB; queue to service AWS SNS, EventBridge and Kinesis; and even payment services such as Stripe and engagement through Twilio or SendGrid are all examples of API-based services that Berkner categorizes under the term serverless.

“They’re like Lego pieces that you connect together,” he said. “You just connect and you go, and you start working and they are up and running. This is how I define serverless today.”

But while this proliferation of API-based services has helped serverless reach the maturity tipping point for widespread adoption, it is also causing the confidence crisis.

“I want to go serverless, I want to go cloud native, but all of a sudden there are dozens of services that I consume via APIs and they’re a part of a bigger picture of my application,” Berkner stated.

The IT team realizes that they lack the tools and awareness to oversee what’s going on within all these services and that they could easily miss when things go wrong. This is where Lumigo comes in.

“Lumigo as a SaaS platform allows you to know what’s happening, get visibility, and be able to get to the root cause of issues before they hit your production,” Berkner said.

Developers can integrate the service in a couple of clicks, with no need for code changes or deployment of agents or services. This is thanks to its “very strong automation engine” based on Lambda layer integration.

“It’s so fast because it’s lightweight. And that’s a trend of managed services, of serverless,” Berkner stated.

The first benefit of the Lumigo platform is its ability to provide visibility across a company’s entire range of serverless services.

“Because we’re connected to the environment, we alert on things that are relevant to serverless,” Berkner said. “It’s about concurrency limits, it’s about cold start, it’s about time outs, it’s about reaching duration limits. … It’s not a generic metric; it’s a serverless metric.”

The second benefit, and one that sells Lumigo to developers, is that it not only alerts when a problem or potential problem occurs, but provides clear and simple debug information. Clicking on an issue brings up a complete timeline of what has happened.

“It tells you the entire story end to end of that specific request, with inputs, with outputs, with environment variables — all the things the developer needs in order to debug, to find the root cause, and then fix it in a matter of minutes,” Berkner stated, describing it as “debugging heaven” for developers.

You can’t have just one; serverless services go viral

It doesn’t take long for companies to realize the advantages of serverless, according to Berkner.

“Once it’s worked for one team, it’s viral,” he said.

When the rest of the company realizes going serverless has reduced that team’s costs by 50% and developer time by 70%, everyone wants in on the technology, he added.

“We provide confidence. You can use serverless in production, and you can rest assured that if something goes wrong, you will be the one alerting and we’ll give you all the information to debug it,” Berkner concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event on September 22. (* Disclosure: Lumigo Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Lumigo nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE