French fries didn’t originate in France, Bombay duck is a fish, and catgut actually comes from sheep. To the list of life’s misnomers can be added serverless computing, because it still requires hardware to run.

But that doesn’t diminish the fact that serverless is becoming an increasingly popular option in the world of information technology, as software developers embrace the benefits of cloud without having to manage a complex network.

With serverless, the management infrastructure is largely invisible to users. Developers take advantage of a microservices architecture with preconfigured functions managed by a cloud provider. It can be a real money-saver too, with users charged only for the time on the system, often measured down to the second.

The rise of a serverless model is presenting a new challenge to enterprise IT management, because it affects how developers use the main resource in application development: software. It’s a different way to think about software architecture and its role in the cloud environment, which will impact how business is built around the technology stack.

“When we’re talking about software, we’re talking about a component which is in almost all of the value chains. It’s shifting from product to utility, massive change, highly predictable; this is what serverless is about,” explained Simon Wardley (pictured), a researcher at Leading Edge Forum. “Will it change everything? Absolutely, it will.”

Wardley paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) during the ServerlessConf event in New York City. They discussed mapping analysis of technology disruption, how serverless is transforming enterprise IT, the ups and downs of the corporate journey in new tech adoption, and advice for companies looking into a move to serverless.

This week theCUBE features Simon Wardley as its Guest of the Week.

Mapping disruption in the enterprise

Leading Edge Forum is a research and advisory service that specializes in providing guidance to IT organizations. It is known for analysis of key factors that are leading to the Matrix era, when game-changing technologies begin driving significant global change. Mapping is a central element of this analysis, and it is Wardley’s specialty.

In Wardley’s mapping analysis, two basic forms of disruption in the technology environment are the unpredictable appearance of something novel and new, and the anticipatable event. Servers aren’t new, but the shift from their use as a product to a utility where a multitude of services can be offered is a transformative development.

“It’s shifting from product, as in servers, to utility, as in cloud,” Wardley said. “When you start looking at value chains of organizations, it’s always the shift from product to commodity and utility which makes the big transformation in industry.”

This evolution also means change in the platform world as well. Web development tools such as Java are giving way to new software that can run code without needing to be provisioned or managed in a server environment. It’s the essence of the “functions as a service” model where products become a utility.

“We’re moving away from a product stack — things like LAMP and .NET — to a much more utility-based, code-execution environment, and that’s what we’re getting with [Amazon Web Services’] Lambda,” Wardley said. “We’re going to see an explosion of things built on top.”

The irony here is that Lambda was initially released by Amazon somewhat quietly in 2014 as just one of more than 100 services in the AWS portfolio. But then Microsoft countered with Azure Functions a year later, and Google charged into the fray with Cloud Functions. The industry tends to notice when the big elephants start dancing on the same stage.

Against this backdrop, enterprise companies are left with the decision to join the serverless revolution or remain on the sidelines. It’s a journey through the lands of despair, happiness and inflated expectations, as described by Wardley.

Stopped by inertia

“The land of despair will be getting stopped behind the inertia barriers,” said the research executive, describing a process in which organizations fail to rapidly and decisively adopt new technologies. “You’ll think you’ve got loads and loads of time, and 10 years from now you’re likely panicking.”

In the land of happiness, function providers or companies who were early adopters of the serverless model could emerge as big winners. IOpipe Inc. is one such example, a company that provides an application monitoring platform for AWS Lambda. The firm just emerged from beta mode in August.

A Cloud Guru Ltd. is another potential candidate for the universe of happiness. A self-described first serverless startup, the company provides AWS cloud certification classes for 300,000 students. “We’re bound to see a one- or two-person company who builds a function which is sold through the marketplace, everybody uses it and [the company] is sold for a billion,” Wardley said.

Does the serverless model cost less money? Recent surveys have shown that the cost savings can be real, as documented in a recent report from 451 Research LLC. The study found that the serverless model offered a lower cost of ownership when compared to pricing for containers and virtual machines. The findings showed that Microsoft and IBM were the least expensive serverless providers, with AWS and Google trending higher.

It’s unclear, however, whether moving to a serverless model actually reduces IT budgets in any substantive way. In the land of inflated expectations, the actual dollar savings may fall short, as a new solution only ends up creating more funding-reliant activity for IT shops.

“One of the big lies is going to be that serverless is going to save me money in terms of reducing my IT budget,” Wardley said. “Nonetheless, loads of consultants will write reports about how it will save you money and loads of people will be disappointed.”

The evolving use of serverless technology has been difficult to quantify, but a survey conducted earlier this year by New Relic Inc. showed that among the 70 percent of enterprises that had workloads in the public cloud, 39 percent were using serverless versus 40 percent using containers. By any measure, that’s a close race, and it underscores the growing popularity of the new model.

As serverless evolves inside the enterprise, companies would be well-advised to adjust skillsets and find ways to be use the technology to best advantage. “The key thing about serverless is we’re seeing a shift from product to utility, so you should be developing skills in that space,” Wardley advised. “You should move up the stack and start with serverless, learning those practices.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more coverage of ServerlessConf on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE