Function as a service, or serverless computing: Cloud’s next big act?- Valutrics

Cautions

Serverless computing won’t work well in some circumstances, though, and it does present challenges for enterprises looking to use it.

For starters, not all programs work well in function as a service, analysts and consultants said. Enterprise IT leaders would likely find it hard to justify, at least at the start, breaking down monolithic applications into functions.

Also, extremely long-running jobs and highly parallel jobs that require a lot of communication between them while they’re running aren’t good candidates for use with this technology, Berkholz said. Nor are functions where there’s a great deal of data transfer between public and on-premises systems.

“They won’t work well for cost reasons or responsiveness,” he said.

Analysts and consultants also noted some challenges and limitations that users will have to consider if moving to function as a service.

Jordan Taylor

First, organizations need to remember that function as a service vendors have certain parameters, particularly around the languages used, noted Jordan Taylor, a DevOps practitioner at Contino. Lambda, for instance, currently only supports Node.js, Java, C# and Python.

Companies might also be limited in their ability to move to function as a service if they don’t have the right skills or practices to fit with this new way of working. “You could have the most perfect piece of technology, but if it’s not with the right workflow or technical configuration or process, it’s not going to work,” Taylor said.

To that point, Chowhan said IT will need to develop a self-service capability for coders to deploy. “It’s something critical for the enterprise [to be successful],” he said.

Additionally, Berkholz said users will have to learn to effectively manage the greater numbers in their software stack if moving to function as a service.

“To know what’s there, so you can [for example] understand how secure it is and whether there are updates, enterprise IT will have to manage it differently. A lot of the [management] software today works with that at a small scale,” he said. “But as you grow with FaaS [function as a service], you could go from [managing] one monolithic application with 1 million lines of codes to [managing] bits of 200 lines of codes in functions — that’s 5,000 functions.”