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(originally written in June 2016)
Serverless computing is purported to be the next big thing. This is a brief overview focusing on Amazon’s AWS Lambda (courtesy of an Amazon webinar and some research).
AWS Lambda is a logical progression in enterprise-class computing, certainly in the Amazon model. When AWS first burst upon the scene a decade ago, it was innovative, but not primarily for technical breakthroughs. In fact, hardware virtualization, which it depended upon, was well underway in enterprise computing, with very successful companies such as VMWare leading the way. What was innovative was Amazon’s ability to aggregate, meter and sell server capacity on-demand and with apparently limitless scale. This was the non-trivial innovation. And although customers were freed from the problems of dealing with physical hardware, management of servers still consumed human and other resources, with under-utilization a chronic issue.
Fast forward to the serverless present and not only is metering of computing resources at finer and finer granularities possible, all the burden and overhead of managing a server-based environment (virtual or no) is magically lifted. In a strange way, it’s a throwback to the happy days of monolithic mainframe computing, when a programmer (we were programmers then, not…