10 Ideas About the Immediate Future of Serverless Computing

Earlier this month, I wrote some predictions for the serverless computing space in 2017. Based on some o fthe feedback received as well as some new information available about the roadmap of the top serverless tacks in the market, I’ve put together a compilation of 10 ideas that I think are going to be relevant in the immediate future of serverless technologies. Let’s take a look:

1 — Serverless Connectors

Integration with SaaS and on-premise back-office systems should be a strong focus of serverless computing stacks in the near future. Platforms such as AWS Lex recently introducess a few serverless connectors that as part of its natural language processing platform.

2 — Composed Functions

Composing serverless functions into more complex serverless routines will allow serverless computing stacks to tackle more sophisticated scenarios. Lambda Step Functions is an initial example of how this type of technology should work.

3 — SaaS Serverless Extensions

I believe serverless routines are going to become the default extensibility mechanism for SaaS systems. Platforms such as Office365m Dynamics 365 or G-Drive are ideal candidates to pioneer that concept.

4 — Serverless Architecture Migration Tools

Cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS have been incredibly successful implementing tools to migrate on-premise solutions to cloud architectures. A similar approach that migrates the backed of traditional enterprise solutions to serverless architectures can be a great catalyzer for serverless computing stacks in the enterprise.

5 — Local Serverless Computing

Executing serverless functions offline on on-premise or IO Runtimes is likely to become a key capability of the next generation of serverless computing platforms. AWS Greengrass is a great example of this capability.

6 — Serverless RAD Tools

Rapid application development(RAD) tools that enable the creation of web and mobile application with serverless backends are likely to become popular within citizen developers in the future.

7 — Enterprise Serverless Middleware

I firmly believe that serverless computing stacks can help reimaging traditional enterprise middleware technologies for the new era of IOT, voice interfaces, bots, etc. The integration of serverless routines into traditional middleware stacks could also be an interesting trend to watch.

8 — Deployment Tools & Compiler Integration

Imagine a world on which developer would write normal programs and simply declare which routines should be deployed as serverless functions. To enable that scenario, compilers and deployment tools will have to be smart enough to identify those declarative settings and take the corresponding actions.

9 — Private Serverless Function Marketplaces Extending the current serverless marketplace model to support private environments will be essential to improve the adoption of serverless stacks in the enterprise. This serverless marketplace model will be similar to the role that the app store plays for mobile apps.

10 — New Serverless Application Lifecycle Management Tools

Tools that improve the lifecycle management of serverless application in areas such as testing, monitoring or versioning should be high on the roadmap of serverless computing stacks. Integration with mainstream application lifecycle management tools might also be a welcomed addition to serverless computing stacks.