The tech industry is like no other when it comes to a new innovation or trend. Over the years, we have seen the rise of various technologies and the frenzy of technologists looking to jump on board. In the late 1990s, there was unprecedented fanfare around Linux, and eventually, it took over the industry as the leading server operating system. In the early 2000s, it was virtualization with VMware and Xen leading the way, and eventually KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) — all increasing server utilization, which paved the way for cloud computing. Today, Linux and virtualization underpin the cloud and have a bigger footprint than ever before. And yet, their ubiquity almost makes them invisible. It’s more or less taken for granted that they provide the foundations for what we do in cloud computing.
Today’s hyped technology conversations center around containers, Kubernetes and serverless. Some of these things will fade into the background of the conversation, just as Linux and server virtualization have, but they will remain part of the everyday cloud infrastructure for things we use. In some cases, today’s new technologies are just the manifestation of architectural patterns that have been around for many years. Serverless uses event-driven architecture (EDA), which has been around for decades. Similarly, containers are application-level virtualization, which has been around since the early days of the mainframe.
At one point in my career, I ran the Node.js Foundation, the trade organization that promoted and shepherded the popular server-side JavaScript framework. At the time, Node was the most deployed workload on Amazon’s serverless offering, Amazon Lambda. That sparked my interest in serverless. The advantage of AWS Lambda was that it provided a managed service that allowed developers to easily deploy Node.js (server-side JavaScript applications). The irony is that while serverless was critical for delivering workloads, it wasn’t the point. This is the mark of truly valuable technology.
Serverless Usage Increasing, Buzz on the Decline
Today we see via Google Trends that the mentions of serverless are dropping.
Google Trends_: Interest over Time for Serverless (retrieved on April 23, 2021)_
The hype around serverless is going down, but the usage is going up according to industry reports. According to a recent report from Datadog, on average, Lambda functions were invoked 3.5 times more often per day at the start of 2021 than they were two years prior. So use of serverless is rising, even if the hype isn’t.
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