Ever since Serverless gained traction among developers with the early success of AWS Lambda, there is quite some confusion on how these platforms fit application needs. In the last two years, there was a proliferation of the next generation of Serverless platforms, going beyond the event-driven use cases to support complex enterprise applications. In the […]
On The Serverless Cold Start Problem
One of the biggest complaints against Functions as a Service (FaaS) like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, IBM Functions, etc. is the problem of cold start. Cold start is about the delay between the execution of a function after someone invokes it. To be more specific, it is about the function at the […]
Introducing Service Semantics To Enable Flow Architectures
Better understanding of Events and Services can enable different deployment and operational architectures in the Cloud-Edge continuum In his blog “Five Facets of Flow Strategy”, James Urquhart identifies potential hurdles to overcome for the latest Computing Paradigm: Asynchronous, event-driven “serverless” computing. Briefly, they are scale (in terms of number/types of events & services), agility, quality, optimization and […]
SpotInst Could Change The Way We Consume Cloud
SpotInst, the Israel based startup focussed on streamlining the use of spot instances in the cloud, today announced their Series B funding of $35 Million. This round is led by Highland. Existing investors, Leaders Fund, Vertex Ventures, and Intel Capital are part of this round. SpotInst is a company that has been under my radar […]
FaaS In The Enterprise: Lacks Maturity But AWS Is Ahead
Functions as a Service (FaaS) is fast gaining developer adoption. We have already talked about the maturity of FaaS and the noise around the term. In this post, we are going to discuss the performance benchmarks on the three of the top four cloud services using the results found in an academic paper. The tl:dr […]
Serverless – Extreme Positions & False Dichotomies
Serverless is driving passionate debate in social media just like how public cloud ramped up the discussions circa 2008. We are once again seeing patterns in discussions that mirror what we saw in the early days of cloud. The increasing pitch of some of these messages (by the respective advocates or critics) are not helping […]
Revisiting Google Serverless Strategy: Will It Slow Down AWS Lambda?
At StackSense, we were skeptical about Google Serverless strategy and even advised readers not to use Google Functions because it was left languishing for quite some time. We rank Google Cloud Functions on the bottom among the four major cloud providers because of the lack of features and lack of general availability for the service. […]
Different Flavors Of Serverless Marketing
Yesterday, I wrote a post about retiring the term Serverless in favor of more specific terms like Functions Compute or FaaS, Data Services, etc.. As I expected, this was met with pushbacks on Twitter from people who are in the AWS camp (as in applying the term for services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, etc.) […]
Let Us Just Retire The Term Serverless
Tech industry loves to create terms that confuse people more than adding any value. Terms like Private Cloud, NoOps, etc. are marketing terms invented by vendors without adding any meaningful value to the industry conversation. The term Serverless falls into this category. Initially, used by Ken Fromm as a way to describe on-demand elastic infrastructure […]
Serverless Will Grow At A Faster Rate Than The Cloud Did
It takes few minutes to setup a Cloud instance and start using it. This is always far faster and easier than provisioning your own hardware. If you look at this as a function of value vs. effort, it may look something like this. It provides limited value for limited effort. All you are getting is […]
Should CNCF Set The Standards For Serverless?
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has been active in setting up a working group for Serverless in order to define the standards. The working group has been active in defining a level of abstraction that could both be complementary and competitive to what CNCF represents. This is also an insurance policy against Serverless driving adoption […]