Cloud-native microservices company Lightbend Inc. announced the general availability of its Akka Serverless platform-as-a-service offering today in a move it says will make serverless computing more accessible for data-hungry applications.

Akka Serverless debuted in beta in June, with Lightbend proclaiming that it will set a new standard for serverless application development by eliminating the need for a database. With that, Lightbend says, serverless deployment becomes a viable option for the most complex applications.

Serverless is a model that enables developers to build and run their apps without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. It has numerous benefits, the most important being that it allows developers to spend more of their time writing code.

Serverless architectures are inherently scalable too, since they enable faster application updates. Often, the costs are less too, since developers are only charged for the compute resources they actually use.

But issues arise when it comes to so-called “stateful applications” that need to save client data from the activities of one session for use in the next session. The problem is that serverless models can’t handle the massive volumes of data required by stateful apps once they scale beyond a certain point.

Leon Stigter, senior product manager for serverless at Lightbend, told SiliconANGLE the problem is that when a stateful application needs to do something, it must connect to a database first of all to access client data. This isn’t a problem for single services, but it causes big headaches when it’s attempted at scale.

“Developers will need to know a lot more about the internal structure of the database, such as which tables are needed to store certain types of data, and how the fields are formatted, because of the many interactions,” Stigter said. “For a few services this is usually trivial but at scale it’s a tremendously difficult topic to solve.”

These problems are significant because it means many kinds of apps, including “internet of things” platforms, e-commerce systems, real-time financial services, streaming media, internet-based gaming and factory automation are not suited for severless deployment.

Lightbend said Akka Serverless opens the door to serverless for stateful applications by eliminating the need for a database. Instead, it provides software development kits which are used to build services, as well as a managed cloud platform to deploy those services.

The SDKs expose a simple programming model that removes the need to write code to handle database access or connections. So developers simply define the data their application needs to access, and everything will be managed behind the scenes and all of the required info an app needs will be made available at runtime.

Akka Serverless also configures and maintains the underlying infrastructure, auto-scales services as required and handles network partitions and failures while providing visibility into the running system.

Akka Serverless is endorsed by none other than Google LLC, which has used the platform in beta to run stateful serverless apps on Google Cloud.

“Organizations are increasingly seeking out solutions that easily enable the development of cloud native applications,” said Google Cloud Developer Advocate James Ward. “We’re pleased to have Akka Serverless running on Google Cloud to provide customers with secure and flexible solutions for building out their cloud native services.”

Lightbend founder and Chief Executive Jonas Bonér said Akka Serverless has proven its value during its beta testing period. “This superior model for cloud-native development can now enable many more complex applications to be built using the serverless model,” he said.

Image: Lightbend