“The technology stack of the future will be composed of containers, serverless & SaaS services”

“2019 could be serverless’ breakthrough year”

JAXenter: Everyone’s excited about serverless computing these days and even if it’s not a silver bullet, some say it’s pretty close. Although there are countless advantages, developers might feel that moving to serverless means giving up too much visibility and control. Is this really the case or is it just a normal reaction that will go away?

Erez Berkner: Serverless systems are different by their nature. It is common to find dozens of small distributed services and functions (API GW, Lambda, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB ,S3, …) in a single serverless request. This is even beyond “Micro-Services” – this is the era of Nano-Services.

This new approach of many small, distributed components creates a visibility challenge because developers struggle to understand the flow of a request: where it started, which user triggered the request and where’s the root cause of any issues. This challenge did not exist in monolith systems and so the existing tools are not focused on solving that problem.

JAXenter: What can Lumigo do to alleviate these fears?

Erez Berkner: Lumigo traces all the requests in the system and builds a live visual map that tells the story of every request from end to end.

JAXenter: What role does it play in the creation of the ecosystem of the future?

Erez Berkner: The technology stack of the future will be composed of containers, serverless and SaaS services. This is how most developers will develop cloud applications. Lumigo’s platform will be the ‘single pane of glass’ giving a window into that world, allowing modern developers to design, monitor and troubleshoot their applications  across the heterogeneous technology stack and different public clouds

JAXenter: Is serverless a “revolution of the cloud,” as Maciej Winnicki, Principal Software Engineer at Serverless Inc. told us at DevOpsCon 2017?

Containers will still have enough use cases and traction to remain dominant even five years from now.

Erez Berkner: Serverless is part of the cloud, like IaaS and managed containers (ECS) are. We see it as the next evolutionary step after VMs and containers and we agree it is a radical transformation in the way developers think, develop and execute their software.

JAXenter: Do you think serverless is the trend that will dominate in 2019 or is it still in its infancy or adolescence?

Erez Berkner: That is a hard one. We believe serverless is heading toward mainstream. 2019 could be serverless’ breakthrough year. But in order for that to happen, three things must happen:

1. More educational material: design patterns and best practices to guide serverless developers across organizations – there have been some good books and blogs posted in the last 6 month and they are gaining decent traction.
2. The serverless eco-system must mature on all fronts: dev, deployment, monitoring, security – interesting startups doing all these things existed for more than a year, but most of them still need to mature.
3. Eliminating the limitations of serverless:  there are still significant limitations with serverless (execution duration limitations, cold starts, logging) – AWS and Microsoft are on the right path and are actively solving those

SEE ALSO: 3 experts predict what’s coming in 2019: Microservices, serverless, and more

JAXenter: Does serverless spell the death of containers?

Erez Berkner: Not for the short/mid-term. Containers will still have enough use cases and traction to remain dominant even five years from now. However, we will start seeing much more containers-serverless hybrid systems (like Knative from google).

In the longer term, as costs are further reduced and limitations eliminated, serverless will win the battle.

Thank you!

The post “The technology stack of the future will be composed of containers, serverless & SaaS services” appeared first on JAXenter.