Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
3 Predictions for Serverless Computing and Development in 2022
By Jonas Bonér, founder
and CEO, Lightbend
As
2021 winds to a close, the market demands that served as the impetus for
creating our Akka Serverless platform have only become more insistent. Those
trends will continue to force developer teams to turn to the serverless model
to overcome the challenges of building reliable, scalable, and available
cloud-native applications while managing the complexities of cloud
infrastructure and distributed systems. Particularly when tackling the most
robust applications today-such as IoT platforms, real-time financial services,
modern eCommerce systems, streaming media, internet-based gaming, factory
automation, telemedicine, and more. With that reality as our guide, here are my
2022 predictions around distributed state and compute, serverless and edge
computing, and more.
Distributed
State in Serverless Goes "Mainstream"
Serverless
computing
services, which let developers focus on building code while having cloud firms
like Google Cloud and AWS manage the underlying computing resources, have
steadily increased from a $7.6 billion market in 2020 to an estimated $21.1
billion in 2025. As robust as this prediction appears, the true potential of
serverless remains untapped, and its ability to hit these growth targets will
be severely hampered unless multiple challenges are addressed.
Today's
serverless offerings are severely limited in the types of applications they can
support efficiently due to challenges related to state management at scale. By
"state," we mean the original condition of the data combined with the changes
made to it over time. A system is stateful if designed to remember preceding
events or user interactions. This designation is critical for the kind of
real-time systems being built today; whether they might be payments made,
auction bids, items in a shopping cart, streaming videos, matching sellers with
buyers, online FPS gaming, or the direction selected by a vehicle, the list is
endless-what these use-cases have in common is the need for keep data close to
where it is currently being used, to provide a convincing real-time experience
for the user.
Current
serverless offerings-Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)-are primarily stateless,
meaning the "stateful" information is stored elsewhere, most often a database.
While being an excellent choice for powering inherently stateless
use-cases-e.g., data pipelining with "embarrassingly parallel" workloads-FaaS
is a poor choice for building general-purpose cloud-native applications.
Modern
cloud-native applications are often composed of many, often quite different,
use-cases ranging from stateless data processing to data-centric, real-time,
stream-oriented, and event-driven services requiring stateful designs to meet
the SLAs in a cost, and resource-efficient manner. For these types of
applications, we need many tools in our toolbox.
Any
enterprise that wishes to leverage the benefits of the serverless model for
truly business-critical real-time and data-centric applications needs to
understand how to effectively and intelligently manage distributed state-ensure
that the application state is adaptively and physically co-located with
compute, yet durable and consistent. It also requires being able to choose the
optimal consistency model for each specific data set-which often varies,
ranging from strong, causal, to eventual consistency-since adding more guarantees
to the data than it actually requires to meet your business needs means putting
an unnecessary ceiling on scalability, availability, and performance.
Currently,
these concepts are still poorly understood by most enterprises. However, as
CIOs continue to push their developer teams, these obstacles will increasingly
come to the forefront, and these enterprises will be actively looking for
solutions. I believe that Akka Serverless will be one of them, but other
solutions will inevitably enter the market as the model becomes more
mainstream.
The
Serverless Model comes to Edge Computing
2021 was the year edge computing came into its own. Even
George Sherman, J.P. Morgan's CIO of global tech infrastructure, has stated he
thinks edge computing is the next big thing. So what will the future
of the edge look like for us as developers, particularly when it comes to
serverless? We have excellent infrastructure nowadays, but that only solves
half of the problem. The serverless developer experience shows the way, but
it's clear that FaaS is not the final answer. We need a programming model and
developer UX that takes full advantage of the new cloud and edge
infrastructure, allowing us to build general-purpose applications without
needless complexity.
Proven models for managing
distributed state at scale combined with serverless is the answer that edge
computing developers will turn to in 2022. Think about it. What if you only had
to think about your business logic, public API, and how your domain data is
structured, not worry about storing and managing it? What if you could become
"databaseless" and forget about databases, storage APIs, OR-mapping, caches,
and message brokers?
Services, powered with this
"data plane" of application state-attached to and available throughout the
network-can run anywhere in the world: from the public Cloud to 1000s of PoPs
out at the edge of the network, in close physical approximation to its users,
where the co-location of state, processing, and end-user, ensures ultra-low
latency and high throughput-this is the future of serverless with the edge.
That said, serverless
applications in an edge environment won't just be about low latency but equally
much about high reliability and availability. Stateful edge computing means
that we can build applications that can continue to function without disruption
in the face of failure. Applications that are composed of multiple autonomous
services all working independently with local data -data that is always right
there, co-located with the end-user-where services can communicate with each
other out at the edge directly, in a point-to-point fashion, not being
dependent on an always-up connection back to the central cloud (so-called local-first
cooperation). This allows for building
extremely resilient systems, systems that must run 24/7 without stopping and
that can adaptively detect, react to, and cope with failure of its parts;
examples include emergency services, trading systems, manufacturing IIoT
systems, autonomous vehicles; the list is significant and growing.
Sustainability
in the Cloud Becomes a Priority
In
the wake of increasingly dire climate projections and global natural disasters
from fires to floods, the 2020s have seen a sharp focus on sustainability in
all levels of infrastructure. Unlike the "greenwashing" of data centers in the
early 00s, which mostly touted limited efforts at conservation, efficiency and
sustainability need to be built into today's cloud infrastructure in terms of
power, cost, geographic footprint, and more. If businesses expect to continue
to compete effectively and still meet the many restrictions that, if they are
not already in place, are most definitely coming soon-they need to implement
strategies for sustainability today.
One
of the most potent and immediate tactics enterprises can employ is shifting
their cloud-based applications and services to a serverless architecture. Doing
so not only enables companies to scale their applications and services easily,
but it can dramatically decrease the amount of hardware and thus the power
required to meet their computing needs; in some cases, exponentially so. The
"pay as you go" model of serverless ensures that the hardware is used as
efficiently as possible; you only pay what you use, and when you are not using
it, then someone else is. It also means that running and operating the system
is delegated to cloud vendors that have the advantage of being able to look
broadly across all of their applications running in the data center and
optimize the resources in ways that a single organization cannot. In 2022,
we're going to see real-world examples from some of the world's most successful
brands demonstrating how IT is meeting its sustainability goals while
simultaneously scaling its services for the future.
Conclusion
We
will have to check back in December 2022 to see if my prescience is accurate or
not. No matter what happens, it's guaranteed to see a season of growth for
mission-critical applications at scale. The world has had its appetite whetted,
and it will be up to us, as an industry, to satisfy these demands with
innovations leveraging the serverless model.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonas Bonér is CEO and
co-founder of Lightbend, and the creator of the Akka event-driven middleware
project. Previously he was a core technical contributor at Terracotta, working
on core JVM-level clustering technology, and at BEA, as part of the JRockit JVM
team. Jonas has also been an active contributor to open source projects
including the AspectWerkz Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) framework and the
Eclipse AspectJ project. He is an amateur Jazz musician, passionate skier and
holds a Bachelors of Science from Mid Sweden University.