The author does not aversion | Ali cloud senior technical experts

Every few years, there are new breakthroughs in IT. Looking back at the history of computer technology, we will find the theme of “abstraction, decoupling, integration” running through it. Every abstraction, decoupling and integration of the industry pushes innovation to a new height and gives birth to a huge market and a new business model.

For most applications, with the help of Serverless service, developers can put most of their efforts into the development and integration of business logic, greatly shortening the development cycle and reducing the operation and maintenance costs. It is said that Serverless is changing the model and process of future software development and that it is the future of cloud computing. The real revolution in technology seems to be the advancement of new technology. Creating value for customers is the starting point of any technological revolution. This article will take another look at why Serverless is the future of the cloud from a customer value perspective.

Value of Serverless to customers

Creating value for customers is the origin of any technological change. Backward from customer value, what really needs to be answered is: what are the pain points of customers? Does Serverless have a clear advantage in addressing customer pain points? Or even create new opportunities for customers? Take the platform strategy of the enterprise for example. Why can’t many SaaS enterprises implement platform strategy like Salesforce and build PaaS or Serverless computing platform? Even do PaaS, do mid-stage become corporate life and death? Although there are top-level design reasons for business and organization, there is no denying that the difficulty and high cost of building a platform are also important reasons. On the one hand to support the rapid development of the front desk business, on the other hand to abstract, reorganization, system reconstruction. New methodologies and tools are needed to reduce the cost of platform construction and enable rapid iterative evolution.

More broadly, the way companies deliver value is being reshaped by digital technology. According to the report of AliResearch, in retail, finance and other industries, digital business forms are replacing traditional business forms, becoming the mainstream and inevitable. Even in industrial manufacturing and other fields, the business form of enterprises is not in the form of digital expression, but make full use of data technology to optimize production and operation, is becoming the industry consensus. In the era of digital transformation, enterprises are facing great competitive pressure and uncertainty, and the ability of time-to-market products is more important than ever. According to Microsoft’s estimates, 500 million apps will be created in the next five years, more than in the previous 40 years combined. Existing research and development models can no longer support such a scale of application development demand.

The idea of Serverless computing is to remove the homogenized and heavy work of development, operation and maintenance based on servers and other infrastructures from the future cloud application development, and build flexible, reliable and low-cost systems or applications in the way of building blocks with the help of the rich hosting service capabilities on the cloud. In addition, cloud service providers also enhance the ability to integrate and be integrated with products in an event-driven manner.

Take Serverless’s core computing product function calculation as an example. Before function calculation came into being, customers had to integrate multiple cloud products through a lot of glue code and carefully deal with various error situations. When function computing is integrated with Aliyun Object storage, events such as uploading/deleting objects generated in object storage can automatically and reliably trigger function processing. Moreover, each link is elastic and highly available, enabling customers to quickly realize real-time parallel processing of large-scale data. Similarly, through the integration of message-oriented middleware and functional computing, customers can quickly achieve real-time processing of large-scale messages. In the future, all events will be captured and reliably handled by services such as functional computing, whether it is a cloud service or a third-party application.

Compared with the traditional development mode, Serverless mode builds applications based on a large number of mature cloud service capabilities, with fewer technical decision points for customers and lower implementation complexity. With the improvement of cloud products, the enhancement of product integration and integration capabilities, and the improvement of software delivery process automation capabilities, we believe that under the Serverless architecture, enterprise agility has the potential to be improved by 10 times.

Value of Serverless to cloud service providers

Serverless helps cloud service providers to establish broader differentiated competitive advantages. The competitive nature of the infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) tier is scale. Cloud service providers maximize performance per watt and performance per dollar by improving bargaining power of supply chain, pooling resources, adopting heterogeneous hardware, and collaborative optimization of hardware and software. The main form of competition in infrastructure layer is price war.

However, the competition of cloud is definitely not a single dimension, just as Apple provides the best implementation of mobile application programming model, which is the synergy and integration ability of hardware, software and service. The excellent user experience and stickiness formed on this basis make it unique in the mobile Internet industry. Cloud service providers also need to think about how to create multi-dimensional and three-dimensional competitiveness in infrastructure, product system, ecology and other aspects. The development of Serverless is related to the construction of differentiated competitiveness of product system, which is crucial to cloud service providers.

Before the advent of functional computing, individual cloud products had difficulty supporting customization requirements and there was little overlap between products. With the advent of functional computing, every cloud service becomes “programmable.” “Programmable” enables cloud services to extend their core capabilities and allow developers to write relevant applications based on this, which not only solves the problem of customization demand support, but also upgrades cloud services into application platforms and establishes the developer ecosystem. Therefore, the product systems of leading cloud service providers are rapidly Serverless, and constantly strengthen the ability of integration and being integrated between products.

Serverless helps cloud service providers improve resource utilization and accelerate hardware innovation. In order to achieve accurate and real-time instance scaling and placement, Serverless computing platform must take the application load characteristics as the basis of resource scheduling. The system usually tracks the request execution time, queuing time, number of requests per unit time, application initialization time and other indicators in real time. The “white box” scheduling based on sensing application load can achieve better real-time scalability and global resource utilization. New virtualization technologies such as lightweight security containers enable smaller granularity of resource isolation (typical Serverless computing services typically support 0.1 vCPU, 128 MB instance sizes), faster startup times, lower system overhead, and more fine-grained and dynamic resource usage in the data center, Fragmentation resources can be more fully utilized. In terms of accelerating hardware innovation, Serverless Computing shields underlying hardware specifications and is able to reuse multiple models, accelerating the large-scale adoption of new hardware.

Serverless helps cloud service providers form a good user structure. The core value of Serverless is technology benefits. Through platform integration and integration, users can build resilient, highly available, low-cost cloud native applications in a more efficient manner. Empower users to accelerate value delivery and achieve business breakthroughs, which is particularly important for small and medium users. Users thrive in the cloud environment, is the most important embodiment of cloud value.

So far, through the analysis of the industrial development trend and the value of Serverless to users and cloud service providers, we can form the following conclusions:

• Apis are the cornerstone of modern applications, not just technology decisions, but business strategies. As a vertical becomes complex enough, corresponding back-end services (BaaS) emerge to deliver value through apis. The vast majority of APIS are Serverless form, and the corresponding computing form is needed, which is the basis for the birth and development of Serverless computing.

• Cloud product systems are becoming fully managed and Serverless, which is not an expectation of the future but a fact that is happening. More than 70% of cloud services today are Serverless, and the proportion will be even higher in the future;

• Serverless is not equal to Serverless computing. It is not a certain type of cloud product, but the entire product system corresponding to the cloud, including computing, storage, intermediate price, data analysis and other services. Serverless defines the programming model for the cloud;

• The essence of Serverless is to answer the question of how to leverage the elements of the cloud to help users achieve disruptive innovation in value delivery. The value delivery of users covers methodology, developer tools, application delivery system, cloud product system, service ecosystem, business model design and other dimensions, so Serverless must be the product of top-level design.

In the era of Cloud 1.0, Cloud hosting simplified the way of obtaining and managing computing resources. In the era of Cloud 2.0, Serverless will become the next generation programming model of Cloud. Writing code, uploading to the cloud, running reliably on any scale, and being the first interface for a new generation of developers to feel the cloud is Serverless’s original vision.

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