A World Beyond Serverless

One of the latest, cutting edge and coolest things in the technical world today is a term called Serverless. Am sure all the tech savvy personnel; if not know; would have at least heard of a term called Serverless. 

The Serverless Framework is a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that allows users to build & deploy auto-scaling, pay-per-execution, event-driven functions. All the leading providers in the cloud space - Amazon (Lambda), Microsoft (Azure), IBM (OpenWhisk) and Google (Google Cloud Platform) have their own versions of the serverless framework at different levels of maturity.

In its simplest form - serverless means that a developer just needs to develop their version of the code or function and upload that to one of the above mentioned providers interface. Depending on the type of functionalities being called in the uploaded code the serverless technologies at the provider’s backend would take care of all the things required to host and run the code (i.e. associate server, compute, storage, App/Web servers, Databases, network, security, etc.).

For a developer, it’s the best thing to have happened as he now does not need to know all the intricacies required to be kept in mind for making his code public to the actual users. For CIO’s/CTO’s and other management personnel the same would drastically bring down the costs on all the associated capex and opex costs required to host, run and manage the application what is developed. Looks like a win-win situation for all.

The providers over here have beautifully used the principles of Encapsulation and hidden all the non-essential components what were earlier and were required to develop and host an application. If I have to draw a similarity – I would like to take the DSLR cameras as an example. Photography earlier used to be a very tough and technical profession. The camera angles, light, aperture, lens, shutter speeds all used to play a very important role and the photographer was expected to be a master of all the above for capturing his ideal shot – which very few used to manage that too after sitting for long hours. Ever since the camera technology has become advanced and with the advent of DSLR cameras all these nuances; which earlier used to be known and mastered by a select few have been encapsulated to such an extent that today even non-photographer’s like me proudly display their DSLR cameras and share their shoots on Instagram’s and Facebooks of the worlds. 

Having said all this – how many have wondered what these providers are going to do with all the uploaded software’s and codes on their systems.

All the associated storage and hardware costs what the providers would put behind supporting the functions uploaded by developers; the providers probably would be trying hard to breakeven and make profits. One of the ways to make profits is by making these uploaded codes; IPs for the providers somehow (by developing their own versions of codes/functions using ML based programming along with Robotic technology).

Just like what the Canons and Nikons of the world have done to the camera world – the vendors can further use these codes to develop functions of their own which at a later date can be called by API’s and micro services of their own and probably someday even go up to the extent of encapsulating the entire software development lifecycle. This would result in consolidation of vendors to a large extent and can also probably result in vendors introducing proprietary usage around certain aspects of technology(ies) when originally the same were crowdsourced.

Therefore, at the end of all this; will come out a world beyond Serverless – hope for it to be as exciting and challenging as today.

Whatever it is – we as technologists are in for an exciting time ahead…So it’s just a ‘Wait, Watch and Most Importantly Learn game’ right now….

 **The views expressed in this article are my own and does not in any way reflect the views of any organization or individuals around technologies or vendors, etc.