After much excitement about serverless computing[1] -- seen as the next evolution of cloud -- IT professionals have lately taken a more cautious line with the approach. In a recent survey, adoption and plans for adoption have even slipped somewhat over the past year. Nevertheless, those enterprises with serious serverless initiatives in place are doubling down on its usage.
These are among the takeaways from a recent survey[3] of 501 IT professionals released by Cloud Foundry,in conjunction with its summit in Philadelphia. Serverless computing is where backend computing functions are managed by a cloud provider -- some call it a combination of Backend as a Service (BaaS) and Function as a Service (FaaS). After a sharp increase in evaluation of serverless in September 2018, the survey report's authors say their data points to a pullback today. In last year's survey, 19 percent were using serverless in their organizations, a number that has slipped to 15 percent in the current survey.
Plans or intentions for serverless implementations have slipped as well, the Cloud Foundry survey also shows. Currently, 36 percent report evaluating serverless, compared to 42 percent in the previous survey.
Some of this may be attributable to the statistical aberrations that occur within surveys that are conducted within months of one another -- don't be surprised if the numbers pop again in the fall survey. Diving deeper into the adoption and planned adoption numbers, the survey's authors point out that within organizations embracing serverless architecture, usage is actually proliferating. For users and evaluators, 18 percent say they are broadly deploying serverless across their entire company, double the percentage (9 percent) who said that only one year ago.
Still, it is telling