More bad news for server-huggers: there's no stopping the momentum toward adopting serverless computing[1] -- in which server management and capacity planning tasks are handled by a cloud provider. Half of IT executives in a recent survey, 50%, say they are already running with a serverless architecture, and 28% intend to do so within the 18 months.
That's the gist of a recent survey[2] and ebook released by The New Stack, covering the state of the art with serverless. The survey of 608 companies finds that of those serverless users, the most profound benefits include the scalability provided, along with a greater speed of development. Among current users, adoption is spreading fast across their enterprises -- 32% said more than a quarter of their organization's application workloads use serverless architectures.
Still, there is confusion in the market about what serverless is and isn't, the survey's contributors state. "Serverless computing still requires servers. Serverless architecture is 'serverless' in terms of the user/developer never needing to take care of, or even be aware of, any individual machines -- the infrastructure is fully abstracted away."
Those IT managers already using serverless report a range of benefits to their software development lifecycles, including flexibility of scaling (48%), speed of development (41%), and cost of resources (40%). These are the main promises of cloud computing, and are being realized when the cloud provider assumes all of the ongoing backend plumbing and infrastructure work, enabling developers to focus on the application, period. In essence, the architecture's power "lies in shortening the time from code development to putting that code in production," the New Stack team observes. "It really is 'here is my code, now run it' -- or,