Standards are essential when any practice has become widespread and many disparate approaches for addressing it have gained traction.
That situation applies in spades to today’s serverless computing market. In platform-as-a-service (PaaS) contexts, serverless computing is well-suited to event-driven, potentially volatile workloads that are on-demand, scalable, efficient, and pay-per-use. Developers can deploy functions quickly with no infrastructure configuration. They can define triggers that initiate autoscaled functions. And they can automatically shut down functions when the work is complete.
Serverless computing’s amazing momentum
Serverless computing has amazing momentum in cloud-native computing these days. As noted in RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report, this approach for building event-driven, stateless cloud applications is now the fastest-growing microservices model, expanding in enterprise adoption at an annual rate of 75 percent. The advantages of serverless computing for lightweight cloud functions have sparked a proliferation of commercial and open-source serverless platforms.
Many serverless environments are native to public clouds. Serverless computing has already invaded public cloud services in a big way, as can be seen through the uptake of especially AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Functions, IBM Cloud Functions, Oracle Functions, and other commercial function-as-a-service offerings.
But serverless computing is also beginning to deeply penetrate private clouds. The past few years have seen the emergence of a dizzying range of alternative serverless platforms for on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multicloud deployments. These include OpenWhisk, Fission, Gestalt, IronFunctions, Nuclio, Fn Project, Funktion, Fission, Kubeless, Funcatron, OpenFaaS, and Webtask.io.
