What Is Serverless?

Chapter 6. Looking to the Future

To close out this report we’re going to gaze into our crystal ball and imagine what changes may happen with Serverless, and the organizations that use it, over the coming months and years.

Predictions

It’s apparent that Serverless tools and platforms will mature significantly. We’re still on the “bleeding edge” of many of these technologies. Deployment and configuration will become far easier, we’ll have great monitoring tools for understanding what is happening across components, and the platforms will provide greater flexibility.

As an industry, we’ll also collectively learn how to use these technologies. Ask five different teams today how to build and operate a moderately complex Serverless application, and you’ll get five different answers. As we gain experience, we’ll see some ideas and patterns form about what “good practice” looks like in common situations.

Our final prediction is that companies will change how they work in order to make the most of Serverless. As we said in Chapter 3, “With the right organizational support, innovation…can become the default way of working for all businesses.” Those first five words are key—engineering teams need autonomy in order to exploit the lead time and experimentation advantages of Serverless. Teams gain this autonomy by having true product ownership and an ability to develop, deploy, and iterate on new applications without having to wait on process roadblocks. Organizations that can manage themselves ...