According to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud report, serverless architecture penetration rate increased to 75 percent. Aware of what serverless means, you probably know that the market of cloudless architecture providers is no longer limited to major vendors such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. Now we have a range of cloud providers to choose from. But, why would anybody switch to serverless architecture? And what is the difference between all those providers and services they offer?
Where Does Serverless Come From?
To answer that question, let’s roll back a bit. Fourteen years ago, cloud technologies began being adopted in IT. The market had to change rapidly, as every year brought new approaches to app development. First, businesses mostly utilized the IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) approach. It entailed renting servers and moving the infrastructure to clouds, but teams still had to deal with server setup. Then came the gradual dismissal of manual server operation, and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) appeared. PaaS providers offered a more complete application stack, like operating systems and databases to run in the cloud and be managed by the vendor. But that wasn’t enough.