Just when you thought you had finally wrapped your brain around cloud computing, another revolutionary concept is on the way.

“Serverless computing,” as it’s called, promises to deliver unprecedented improvements in speed, simplicity and cost that may upend traditional assumptions about how information technology is delivered. Even as the cloud continues to disrupt traditional tech providers and corporate data centers alike, serverless could usher in another round of transformative change.

Despite the name, serverless computing doesn’t actually do away with servers. Instead, it’s about abstracting as much IT infrastructure as possible away from the application so that developers can focus on functions rather than fiddling with memory settings and operating system versions. Applications are assembled from individual, function-specific components, in the same way a picture puzzle is built from many small parts.

To use a real-estate analogy, traditional IT infrastructure is like a house that must be built and maintained. Cloud computing is like a condominium: The structure doesn’t need much attention, but you need to furnish and maintain the interior.

Serverless computing is more like a hotel room. There’s no setup and no maintenance, and you use computing resources only as long as you need them. But unlike a hotel room, the serverless approach is actually cheaper than the cloud condo or on-premises house. That’s because users only pay for the services they use, not for the time the server is active, and services can be delivered in fractions of a second.

“You don’t have to worry about servers,” said Ryan Kroonenburg, founder of A Cloud Guru Ltd., an online video training platform for IT professionals. “You can just focus on your code, and [serverless is] ridiculously cheap.”

A Cloud Guru is using a serverless platform to redefine the economics of training. More than 300,000 people completed one or more courses before the company even reached its threshold of free invocations – or serverless events – that are included in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda platform. As a result, the company can offer its courseware at a fraction of the cost of alternatives, Kroonenburg told Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman and theCUBE co-host John Walls in an interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio at AWS Summit 2017 (below).

Platforms in place

There are several commercial serverless platforms available, including Lambda, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Functions and Google LLC’s Cloud Functions. Several open-source frameworks are also available, including OpenWhisk, Fission, Gestalt, Nuclio, Fn and IronFunctions. They can be used in public clouds, private clouds or even potentially deployments at the edge of networks.

Although large-scale production use cases are still rare at this early stage, the technology appears to be poised for rapid growth. Research and Markets estimates the market for “function-as-a-service,” as serverless is more accurately called, will grow 33 percent annually through 2021, when it will reach $7.7 billion.

“It has the potential to be the new way of doing things,” said Miniman, who recently wrote an introductory guide to serverless computing that features 11 minutes of video clips from an assortment of serverless experts. Miniman noted that Amazon’s support of serverless computing is one of the principal factors driving the market. In fact, AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy has said that if Amazon.com were being built today, much of the website and underlying software architecture would be serverless.

Amazon’s Echo virtual assistant is the type of application that lends itself well to the serverless model. “When you ask ‘Alexa, what’s the weather?’ it kicks off a bunch of processes that are only used for a short period of time,” Miniman said. “You can call a service from anywhere.”

Serverless computing still requires servers to deliver functions. The difference is that entire servers don’t have to be spun up to perform every function. Applications are abstracted away from the underlying hardware using preconfigured software containers or other techniques, enabling functions to be packaged for rapid onetime use and then shut down in as little as a few microseconds.

“You can call, use and detach when you’re done,” Miniman said. Not only is this process more efficient than provisioning servers, but it also eliminates the problem of cloud sprawl that occurs when the servers aren’t shut down on a timely basis.

Start from scratch

Adopting this new paradigm isn’t as simple as “lifting and shifting” existing applications. “You need to rebuild applications for serverless,” Miniman said.

The architecture also isn’t ideally suited for every application. For example, processing-intensive functions such as video rendering or large-scale printing are better handed with more traditional development models. But as applications are increasingly deconstructed into components that interact via application programming interfaces and microservices, serverless will be an attractive option, Miniman said.

The fact that cloud infrastructure vendors are some of the leading cheerleaders for serverless computing may seem paradoxical given that the approach reduces the need for cloud resources. But Miniman has a simple explanation.

“This is a phenomenal lock-in opportunity,” he said. Because each serverless architecture is unique, “rearchitecting to build on somebody else’s environment can be really difficult. If the application is wired into AWS, it works well, but it’s hard to port somewhere else.”

But maybe not for long. A number of serverless frameworks are already in play, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has created a serverless working group to address, among other things, “lack of standardization and interoperability between cloud providers.” Although market leaders certainly will keep advancing their own standards, it’s likely that users will also have options for standardized and portable environments when they make the decision to go serverless.

Serverless computing won’t make the cloud obsolete, but it could transform the notion of the cloud from “servers in the sky” to “services on demand.” “The torrid pace of adoption an innovation in the serverless space has totally blown us away,” Jassy told SiliconANGLE last fall. Now it’s about to blow away the rest of us.

Image: Hans Peter Gauster/Unsplash