Summary: It is expected that in 2021, a large number of core applications of mainstream enterprises will migrate from the original host architecture to the Serverless architecture.

The author | sessions (flower: Jiang Yu)

In 2021, Serverless Architecture was published in The Forrester Wave™: Function-as-a-service Platforms, Q1 2021, begins A New Year of rapid development. In the report, not only the global mainstream Serverless platform is evaluated, but also the past technical development is more scientifically summarized, and the future development vision of the product is prospected and explored.

As one of the key trends in cloud computing in the next decade, the Serverless architecture has shown great potential. Forrester believes that the rise of Serverless architecture makes FaaS (Function As A Service) become A new cloud computing capability provision method following IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. It is expected that in 2021, a large number of core applications of mainstream enterprises will migrate from the original host architecture to the Serverless architecture.

• In 2018, Gartner, the world’s leading IT consulting and research institute, released a report, which listed Serverless architecture as one of the ten technology trends that will affect infrastructure and operation and maintenance in the future.
• In 2019, UC Berkeley published a paper “Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing states that “The Serverless architecture will become the default Computing paradigm in the cloud age”.
• In 2020, CNCF released the “China Cloud Native Survey Report 2020”, in which it can be seen that Serverless architecture is growing continuously, 31% of units are using Serverless in production, 41% are evaluating, and 12% plan to use it in the next 12 months.
• In the past year of 2021, there are not only Forrester and Datadog’s reviews and reports, but also Serverless’s booming trend in the process of COVID-19 affecting the global economic progress and technological development.

This paper will be based on the development of Serverless architecture, including but not limited to the evaluation and research of various institutions on Serverless architecture; Construction of Serverless architecture by cloud vendors; Community development and ecological expansion of Serverless architecture. Review the development of Serverless architecture in 2021, and make an inventory and summary of the development of Serverless architecture.

Industry and Serverless Architecture

1. Serverless architecture in the eyes of the industry

2021 is a year of great interest for Serverless architecture. This year, not only Forester, DataDog and a series of other organizations are paying attention to Serverless architecture. There are also academic research on Serverless architecture becoming more abundant; More industries began to recruit Serverless architecture talents in the community and platform.

This not only shows that Serverless architecture has gradually matured and been accepted by more people after several years of development; It is also more intuitive that the Serverless architecture has truly been “more widely viewed.” This marks the beginning of the Serverless architecture playing a more important role in the advancement of cloud computing.

1. In March 2021, Forrester releases q1 2021 FaaS Platform (Function-as-a-Service Platforms) Evaluation Report

In this more rigorous and scientific assessment, there are three cloud vendors in the leadership quadrant, namely Alibaba, Amazon and Microsoft; There are also three cloud manufacturers on the list in China, namely Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei.

Although the commercialized Serverless architecture was first initiated by AWS, Chinese cloud computing enterprises have been engaged in a position war in advance in the development of Serverless and quickly entered the vanguard ranks. In the report, not only Alibaba Cloud Computing is in a leading position, but also Tencent Cloud Computing is ranked very high. Rated as a strong performer based on excellent performance in product service matrix, partner ecosystem, and customer size dimension.

2. DataDog also published Serverless related reports in 2021

In the report, DataDog reported a 250% spike in Serverless usage, putting Serverless back in the spotlight.

According to DataDog’s research, companies that have been using Lambda have significantly increased their adoption since 2019. By early 2021, these companies were calling three and a half times as many functions per day as they had two years earlier. In addition, among the same group of Lambda users, each enterprise feature runs an average of 900 hours per day.

This shows that the business scale of Serverless architecture is rapidly expanding. In addition to the content related to the number of users, this research report also includes the performance change of Serverless architecture, toolchain selection, runtime usage and many other noteworthy information. Through these data, it is not difficult to find that compared with 2020, in 2021, the foreign Serverless user group is rapidly expanding, the function execution time is increasing, the use mode is becoming more mature, and the developer tools are better and more open.

3. Employment opportunities for the Serverless architecture will increase gradually in 2021.

Through a recruitment platform, it can be seen that in the past year, not only the major cloud manufacturers in the Serverless talent, but also including Guangzhou Opo, Juhuasuan.com, Zebra Network, NetEase, Sound network Agora, Pinduoduo and many other leading enterprises in the industry, Serverless related talent recruitment. This also fully shows from another perspective that Serverless architecture is gradually becoming more popular and adopted by more corporate teams, and the related talent gap is also gradually emerging.

Since 2012, the concept of Serverless was formally proposed; In 2014, AWS led Lambda to start the commercialization of Serverless; In 2017, major manufacturers have laid out the Serverless field; In 2019, Serverless became a hot topic and was discussed by many people in KubeCon. By 2020 and 2021, various institutions have conducted large-scale research, evaluation and reports on Serverless architecture, and many enterprises begin to select Serverless architecture to implement it on a large scale.

Serverless With the continuous advance of time, the continuous progress of various technologies, is moving towards a more complete, clearer direction of development. With the arrival of 5G era, Serverless will play a crucial role in more fields.

2. Serverless architecture in the eyes of academia

In the stage of rapid development of cloud computing, the form of cloud computing is also constantly evolving. From IaaS to PaaS, and then to SaaS, cloud computing has gradually “found the right development direction”.

In a 2012 article called “Why The Future of Software and Apps is Serverless” written by Ken Form, vice president of Iron.io, And for the first time brought the word “Serverless” into the public consciousness. :

Even with the rise of cloud computing, it’s still all about servers. However, this won’t last long, cloud applications are moving towards serverless, which will have a major impact on how applications are created and distributed,

1. Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

In 2018, Serverless was growing faster than expected, and UC Berkeley published this article expressing concerns and challenges about the Serverless architecture.

This article puts forward the following points:

By offering automatic scaling, today’s FaaS offerings take a big step forward in cloud programming by providing a virtually manageable, seemingly infinite computing platform. However, they ignore the importance of efficient data processing; Second, they hinder the development of distributed systems.

Any new technology or concept will meet certain challenges and concerns, just as when cloud computing appeared, some people (such as Larry Ellison, president of Oracle Corporation, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU) thought it was just another commercial hype concept, nothing new. Even stupid.

Of course, facts have also proved that any new thing can grow stronger only after experiencing various challenges and doubts, Serverless is no exception.

2. Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing

In 2019, a year later, UC Berkeley published another article on the Serverless architecture, in which the author strongly asserts that Serverless will be rapidly adopted and developed over the next decade.

And makes a more radical claim about the Serverless architecture:

“Serverless will become the default computing paradigm in the cloud era, replacing Serverful computing. This means the end of the server-client model and the Serverless architecture will lead the next decade of cloud computing.”

In the academic world, not only UC Berkeley has published many papers on Serverless, but many universities at home and abroad have invested enough energy in the field of Serverless for scientific research and exploration. At present, Serverless has become a research hotspot in the academic world. Every year, there is an obvious growth trend in Serverless architecture-related papers:

In 2021, the number of papers on Serverless architecture in the academic world will not only increase again, but also its research content and direction will become more and more perfect and comprehensive, including but not limited to cold start optimization, mirror acceleration, scheduling strategy, caching mechanism and many other hot issues.

3. FaaSNet: Scalable and Fast Provisioning of Custom Serverless Container Runtimes at Alibaba Cloud Function Compute

Take the paper published in USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC) by Ali Cloud Function computing team and George Mason University Leap Lab as an example.

In this paper, the problem of “image pull and cold start optimization” after the combination of container image ecology and Serverless architecture is further explored. In terms of accelerating the distribution speed of images, common mature P2P schemes in the industry do not achieve function-level awareness, and most of the topology logic in the cluster is the fully connected network mode, which puts forward certain requirements on the performance of the machine.

These presettings are not suitable for the system implementation of FC ECS, so a lightweight system middleware with high scalability, FaaSNet, is designed and proposed. FaaSNet uses the image acceleration format for container distribution, and the target scenario is the large-scale container image start (function cold start) under the burst of traffic in FaaS.

The core component of FaaSNet includes Function Tree (FT), which is a decentralized and self-balanced binary Tree topology. All nodes in the Tree topology are equivalent.

FaaSNet can achieve real-time networking based on workload dynamics to achieve function-Awareness, without the need to do workload analysis and pre-processing, thus helping Serverless platform to unlock the technical bottlenecks of high scalability and fast image distribution speed. Enables deeper and wider use of custom container image scenarios.

4) Faa$T: A Transparent Auto-scaling Cache for Serverless Applications

In addition, SoCC, the top conference in the cloud computing field, can also see many shadows of Serverless architecture in the papers received in 2021.

For example, in the paper taking Microsoft Azure Functions as the experimental platform, aiming at the stateless feature of Serverless architecture and the Cache problem of FaaS platform, An autoscaling distributed cache Faa T for Serverless applications is proposed, which can greatly improve the performance of Serverless functions. Compared with the existing method of using external storage as Cache system, FaaT can greatly improve the performance of Serverless function. Compared with the existing method of using external storage as Cache system, FaaT can greatly improve the performance of Serverless function. Compared to the existing approach of using external storage as the Cache system, FaaT can reduce most of the overhead.

5) ServerMore: Opportunistic Execution of Serverless Functions in the Cloud

This paper introduces ServerMore, a server-level resource manager, aiming at the short execution time and low resource demand of Serverless function. Serverless and Serverful VMS can be scheduled to perform tasks on the same physical machine. ServerMore dynamically adjusts CPU, memory bandwidth, and LLC resources on the server. To ensure that hosting between Serverful and Serverless workloads does not affect application tail latencies.

By selectively using the Serverless architecture and extrapolating the performance of the relatively black-box Serverful workload, ServerMore improved resource utilization by an average of 35.9% to 245% compared to the previous pattern; There is minimal latency impact to both the Serverful application and the Serverless architecture.

In the past year, academic research on Serverless architecture has become increasingly popular, and many excellent papers related to Serverless architecture have emerged at the top of various fields, which not only contributes to the prosperity of Serverless academic ecology, but also greatly helps to break the technical bottleneck of Serverless architecture. Upgrade the technical architecture of cloud computing.

In addition, in 2021, domestic Serverless books and monographs are also gradually increased. In just one year, there are successively including Front-end Serverless: Real Serverless Architecture for full stack, Serverless from entry to advanced: Architecture, Principle and Practice, Serverless Engineering Practice: From The Beginning to the Advanced, Huawei Serverless Core Technology and Practice and other books have been published, which greatly enrich the data ecology of domestic Serverless training and education.

With the development of time, Serverless architecture is playing a more and more important role in more fields. While attracting more attention, Serverless architecture has gradually become the research object of many scholars and laboratories. How to organically combine academia and industry, how to empower academic research through industry, It is not only what Serverless architecture needs to do, but also what the Current Serverless architecture is doing, to enable the industry to move forward through the iterative upgrading of its technical architecture through academic research.

Serverless architecture evolution

1. Serverless architecture driven by vendors

Although CNCF has already released “CNCF Serverless Whitepaper V1.0” in 2018, clarifying the general situation of Serverless technology, ecosystem status, and formulating relevant specifications and standards, up to now, The Serverless architecture, in many ways, is still primarily driven by cloud vendors.

On the one hand, promote the upgrade of technology iteration; on the other hand, promote the Serverless architecture to be implemented in more fields; Today, the competition of cloud computing has become white-hot. The performance of Serverless architecture in different vendors, the speed of update and iteration and the future development plan are also extremely fierce.

In the past 2021, various cloud vendors have made great efforts in the Serverless field. From the perspective of FaaS platform, in the past year:

• In order to achieve higher performance, many cloud vendors have begun to carry out large-scale upgrading and innovation of their underlying technology architecture, including: Ali Cloud Serverless large-scale migration to DpCA architecture, and release Serverless GPU instance in 2021 Cloud Computing Conference; Yuanrong, as the kernel of Huawei Cloud Serverless, came from behind the scenes and released FunctionGraph 2.0;
• In order to further integrate Serverless architecture and container mirroring ecology, major manufacturers have made support for Serverless container mirroring. AWS Lambda continues to make efforts at the container mirroring level, and currently supports 10G Serverless image deployment.
• AWS Lambda launched Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights in December last year, and has continued to update it since, in order to achieve better observable results and help businesses and developers get the detailed status of their resources more quickly. Support for AWS Lambda container images, AWS Lambda functions powered by the AWS Graviton2 processor, in April and November 2021, respectively; In terms of observability, Ali Cloud function calculation is also constantly updated and iterated, with more detailed processing and analysis for more performance indicators, abnormal indicators, tracking indicators, and more detailed support for asynchronous calls. In addition, there are instance level indicators first established in the industry.
• At the event ecosystem level, AWS Lambda has strengthened its integration with SQS, MSK authentication and other related event sources over the past year, and further strengthened its integration with EventBridge to provide a unified access surface to support EDA architecture application development. Ali Cloud function computing chose to deeply integrate with EventBridgt at the very beginning. By connecting ali Cloud ecosystem and event sources of customer business SaaS system in a standardized and unified way, ali Cloud function computing rapidly expanded its event ecosystem from dozens of event sources to hundreds of event sources. It can provide rich event source triggering ability support for developers, enabling more business scenarios and helping customers integrate with Serverless ecology more conveniently.

Of course, in the past year, the development of Serverless architecture is rapid. Although the above brief summary on the underlying technology architecture, container mirror ecology, observability, event ecology and other aspects of each cloud vendor is made, in fact, in 2021, each cloud vendor will be in Serverless architecture. In particular, FaaS platform efforts are not only so, the launch of AWS Lambda Extensions, Ali Cloud function computing instance login, Tencent Cloud function new Web function type, Baidu intelligent cloud CFC also gradually support single instance multiple concurrent functions……

As the “default computing paradigm in the cloud era” described by UC Berkeley, various cloud vendors will pay in various aspects on Serverless architecture in 2021. Of course, from the perspective of FaaS alone, it is not difficult to find that in the process of each cloud vendor’s update and iteration, there are several important routes that gradually become clear:

1. The event ecosystem is getting richer, especially the integration of message-oriented middleware and FaaS platform.
2. FaaS platform is becoming more and more closely related to container ecology, and its support for container ecology is becoming more and more perfect.
3. New Runtime support, the old Runtime has gradually become one of the burdens of the FaaS platform, cloud vendors are not only trying to support more updated Runtime, but also trying to expand their own Custom Runtime and Custom Container application scenarios;
4. The traditional framework migration has gradually become a relatively clear scenario support, most cloud vendors have begun to launch the traditional framework migration scheme and Serverless deployment scheme;
5. As an important part of Serverless architecture, FaaS platform has gradually failed to meet more business deployment scenarios under Serverless, and application hosting mode is emerging. Although in the past, some articles have questioned this model is not in accordance with the spirit of Serverless, but the facts and time proved that application hosting model is an indispensable technology selection in the development of Serverless architecture;
6. The application scenario driving of FaaS platform is becoming more and more obvious. Whether SAM launches the machine learning inference template suitable for AWS Lambda or Ali Cloud function computing releases GPU instances, support for scenarioization has gradually become one of the important directions and goals of technology upgrading and iteration.
7. As FaaS platform may make business resources more fragmented, the need for more delicate and scientific rights management gradually emerges.

Serverless is the main form of cloud computing in the next 10 years. Driven by cloud vendors, Serverless architecture is rapidly updating and iterating in the FaaS level, as well as accelerating the pace of progress in the BaaS level.

With the popularity of cloud native and Serverless, event-driven has once again become a buzzword in cloud application architecture. In 2018, Gartner’s evaluation report listed event-driven Model as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends, and event-driven Architecture (EDA) will become the mainstream of microservices in the future. The report also makes the following predictions:

By 2022, event notification software models will be the solution for over 60% of new digital businesses; At the same time, by 2022, more than 50% of business organizations will participate in the event-driven digital business services ecosystem;

In May of the same year, the Cloud Native CNCF Foundation hosted the open source CloudEvents project, which aims to describe events in a unified and standardized format to enhance interoperability between different services, platforms and systems. The importance of events in the cloud native map is self-evident.

In the past year, cloud vendors in the event ecology of the force, visible. Ali Cloud, for example, launched EventBridge event Bus in 2020, and has continuously upgraded and iterated over the past year, successively adding nearly 100 kinds of event access. From IaaS to PaaS, hundreds of millions of events are generated every day and are more deeply integrated with functional computing. At AWS, The EventBridge product has averaged monthly updates over the past year, Including, but not limited to, updates and iterations of CloudWatch Synwide-plank’s ability to support Canary events using Amazon EventBridge, and to share events across event buses in the same account and region.

In addition to the continuous improvement of event ecology, the infrastructure of Serverless architecture is also being rapidly constructed. Serverless DB has become one of the focus of exploration by many manufacturers, and workflow has gradually become a “battle ground”.

With the slogan of All on Serverless, Serverless First and Serverless Faster, in the past year and more, We can’t help but wonder at the speed of technology and the growth of the vain-driven Serverless architecture.

2. Community-driven Serverless architecture

The development of Serverless architecture is driven by cloud vendors and supported by the open source community. In the past 2021, Serverless architecture has gradually become more common, whether it is the continuous attention and empowerment of CNCF and other foundations, or the construction of Serverless architecture by other Serverless communities and open source projects. Better technology architecture, simpler and more valuable technology selection.

1) Construction of tool chain

In the past year, Serverless Devs, as an emerging Serverless toolchain project, officially released version 2.0. From the slogan of “no vendor lock-in”, it is gradually being built into “Serverless application lifecycle management tool”.

From multi-cloud deployment support, to open source tool chain construction, to open Serverless community building, from the official release of Serverless Devs Model, From the introduction of the shortest path migration solution of the traditional framework under the Server ress architecture, to the bold exploration of Serverless application debugging, the release of local debugging, end-to-end cloud debugging, cloud debugging and other functions, and finally to the construction and launch of the Serverless application Center, an industry-level solution that supports multi-cloud. Serverless Devs is building an open source Serverless toolchain system through the power of the open source community, creating a community platform without vendor lock-in, and allowing developers to use the Serverless architecture just like using mobile phones.

When it comes to the construction of Serverless toolchain, we have to say Serverless Framework, as an overseas old Serverless toolchain open source project with over 40,000 stars.

Serverless Framework has also been updating and iterating in the past year. After updating and upgrading from Plugin version to Component version, Serverless Framework has a closer cooperation with Tencent Yunyun function in China. In the past year, Serverless Framework has made bold exploration and brave attempts from Cli Design level, functional support dimension, enterprise development and application level. In China, It also launched Serverless Application Center service jointly with Tencent Yunyun Function to provide developers with more convenient application deployment approaches and application management capabilities.

Of course, in addition to Serverless Devs and Serverless Framework and other domestic and foreign multi-cloud developer tool chain systems, many Serverless related open source tool chain systems at home and abroad have also carried out rapid iterations and upgrades in the past year. This includes AWS SAMCLI, CloudBaseFramework and so on. It is worth mentioning that CloudBaseFramework, as a very potential developer tool, has also made a lot of contributions to the open source cause in the past year. Including but not limited to CloudBase CMS content management system open source, etc.

2. Serverless Development framework

In addition to open source at the tool level, Serverless First as the core of the open source framework in the past year has been in full bloom, there is the old IoC system design, based on the original Midway, reuse the original decorator and decoupling ability, while decomposing the code into different functions. Midway FaaS on all cloud platforms; Malagu, a typescript-based Serverless First, componentization, platform-independent, progressive application framework; Of course, there is an excellent framework like FaasJS that has been iterated over 150 versions a year.

The Open source community has contributed much more to the Serverless development framework over the past year, but whichever way you look at it, it’s not hard to see that as the Serverless architecture becomes the technology of choice for many businesses, In the migration and deployment of traditional framework, Serverless architecture and the framework system with Serverless First as the core idea reflect each other and become an important connection point for the main developers to use Serverless architecture faster, more simple and practical, and more convenient to get started.

In addition to the construction of the tool chain, Serverless framework is also booming, in April 2021, Baidu function computing engine EasyFaaS officially open source, as a rely on light, strong adaptation, less resource use, stateless and high-performance function computing service engine, EasyFaaS has also become an excellent open source function computing engine after OpenWhisk, Knative and many other open source Serverless platforms.

3. A more prosperous community ecology

In 2021, in addition to the vigorous development of open source projects, the Serverless community is also becoming more and more lively. Not only the top conferences of various industries can be seen at any time about Serverless issues, but the Serverless Days conference will be held again. In addition, Serverless Developer Meetup has been successively held in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities, and Serverless city stations in corresponding regions have been set up to establish domestic Serverless thousand community. At the level of universities empowered by Serverless architecture, Serverless Developer Meetup community entered Hunan University for the first time, Huawei Serverless Campus open class activity huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Tencent Yunyun development campus evangelist cultivation program.

To sum up, the community path of the Serverless architecture is relatively clear:

• Serverless architecture community, from tools, frameworks, computing engines and other aspects of a very excellent open source projects in the continuous update and iteration; At present, Serverless Toolchain focuses more on the construction of vlock-free, enterprise-class solutions, scenarios and application centers; Serverless open source framework is more based on the thought of Serverless First construction;
• In addition to the flourishing open source projects, there is a growing community of activities, communities. Through the activities of various open source organizations, through various conferences and collisions with Serverless architecture, the Serverless architecture will attract more attention and more people will participate in it.

From open source tools to open source frameworks, from vendor lock-in to Serverless First, from open source computing engines to community meetings and developer activities become increasingly frequent and lively, from enterprises to universities, enabling education industry keeps making breakthroughs and innovations in the field of cloud computing. The Serverless architecture in the past 2021, driven by the community, has gradually started to move with more solid steps towards the future.

conclusion

With the development of cloud services, computing resources are highly abstracted. From physical machines to cloud servers, and then to container services, computing resources gradually become more delicate.

Since the term Serverless was first introduced to the public by Ken Form in 2012, the Serverless architecture has been constantly updated and iterated with the attitude of “realizing the original dream of cloud computing”, constantly improving and developing.

As 2021 rolls by, the Serverless architecture is well on its way to its tenth year.

With the continuous completion of the definition of Serverless architecture and the continuous enrichment of the event ecology, more and more attention is paid to the Serverless architecture in the industry and academia, and the open source community is becoming increasingly perfect and lively. Serverless architecture is no longer the existence of “can be viewed from a distance but not at the pleasure of playing”. It can help developers focus more on more valuable business logic, make business development more focused, reduce the cycle of business innovation, improve the overall performance of business, and connect to the technology selection.

From IaaS to FaaS to SaaS, and now Serverless, the development of cloud computing has undergone tremendous changes in the past ten years. From virtual space to cloud host, from self-built database and other businesses to cloud database and other services, the development of cloud computing is rapid, Serverless architecture is also placed high hopes by many people.

Perhaps the Serverless architecture is just in time, and has already embarked on a massive implementation from concept to practice, as predicted in the Gartner report: by 2025, half of the world’s enterprises will adopt FaaS deployment; Perhaps the Serverless architecture of today is not the ultimate Serverless architecture; Perhaps the spirit of Serverless also needs further construction and improvement, but there is no denying that Serverless architecture will be on its way forward:

“More and More energetic, More and More fast and powerful.”

The authors said.

When receiving the invitation to write the technical reprint of Serverless Architecture in 2021, the author himself was both excited and frightened, fearing to bury some excellent events. Although there is abundant information on the Internet nowadays, after further study and research, the author completed this article, but it is undeniable that there may still be omissions in this article. We hope you can give us your advice, and welcome you to learn and communicate in the comments section. The author himself will continue to learn and improve the relevant knowledge field.

In addition, the above content only as part of the author himself in study and life, the view is just the author’s point of view, not on behalf of the company, school, and the platform on which point of view, in addition, the text part of the information is from the network, there is no strict verification, if there is contrary to the situation of the objective truth, also welcome pointed out. Finally, I sincerely hope that students with different views can discuss with me, and I hope that more people can participate in the construction of Serverless architecture.

The original link

This article is the original content of Aliyun and shall not be reproduced without permission.