Does Serverless Eventually Will Kill DevOps?
Every time you have to read about the next newborn killer of an iPhone or Facebook, you unwittingly start to smile. Over the years, so many of them have already been.
Therefore, stumbling upon another publication, where the key idea was the idea that the upcoming era of serverless computing of applications (Serverless) would “eat” DevOps, there was no limit to skepticism.
In fairness, it should be said that cloud technologies really “tear the vest” on all fronts. In many ways, the reason for this is the rapid depreciation of “iron”, as a result of the simplicity and accessibility of advanced technologies against the background of the business’s permanent thrust to increase efficiency and speed of innovation. Everyone wants here and now, and preferably for free.
The emergence of the Serverless concept of building and running applications without having to configure the server part on this background seems logical. Despite the popularity of the name “Serverless”, the abbreviation FaaS (“Functions as a Service”) is also found. So, you should not be misled by the notorious Serverless. It does not mean a complete failure of the servers. As it is known: “If something has departed, it means somewhere has arrived.” In this case, we are talking about the fact that iron goes to the side of Amazon, Microsoft and other monsters of the industry, giving ordinary developers the opportunity to create without regard for the size of the server cabinet and good relations with the DevOps team.
Key benefits of the Serverless concept:
- Easy to create and deploy product;
- The ability to quickly and easily scale your project;
- High availability and fault tolerance of the backend;
- No need to manage the server infrastructure and, as a result, reduce your costs of maintaining its efficiency;
- Accelerate application development;
- Reduced infrastructure costs and DevOps (and you no longer need Docker);
DevOps is dead, long live DevOps?
Serverless is a great addition to automation. Any good DevOps using AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, or GCP is capable of applying appropriate serverless solutions to increase application manageability. But the richer the environment, the more necessary people are able to adapt to it. In other words, DevOps, of course, will not die, but the requirements for knowledge and skills of specialists inevitably evolve.
Moreover, the scope of application serverless is already very wide:
- Finance
- Retail
- IoT
- Social media
- Chat rooms
- Uber-like applications
Where on serverless you can implement very different scenarios:
- Backend for applications and sites
- Data Processing (images, video, logs)
- IoT (including SmartCity)
- Serverless websites
- Automated tasks (including backups)
- Cloudlet
- (data preprocessing)
- Chatbots
- Programming Learning Environments
Who is there?
Major players already in this market: Amazon AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, Oracle. With significant resources, IT giants are able to work in promising areas, capturing trends and significantly outperforming the industry in its development. Plus, there are many open source projects that implement serverless to one degree or another.
Today we have a rather motley picture. On the one hand, as in the rest of the world, solutions from market leaders such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google dominate, and on the other hand, there are truly interesting alternatives.
Rusonyx serverless based on swifty.cloud is actually an out-of-the-box platform for backend applications, websites, and chatbots, but not limited by the capabilities of traditional Backend-as-a-Service solutions.
It includes most of the required services:
- Serverless functions
- SQL and NoSQL database
- Object storage
- Authentication-as-a-Service
- Cute UI, API, CLI for Mac/Linux
- Function Templates and Entire Services
Conclusions
We are moving further away from the set of skills that are associated with traditional DevOps. Technology is changing, and we must change with it. At the same time, even if the cloud provider does everything for you, the product quality control function will not go anywhere. Automation frees you from your daily routine, giving you the opportunity to do what you may have put off for a long time.
