4+1 Top Serverless Trends in 2020

We owe a big thank you to every participant who shared their insight with us, so we can in turn pass it on to you.

This blog post highlights 5 exciting serverless trends, but it’s only a taste of all the data we’ve compiled. Or take a deep dive, and download the full State of Serverless 2020 report to get data on all the 20+ serverless trends we’ve researched. It contains the most popular frameworks, FaaS products, container services, tooling, cloud security, and much more.

In this blog post, we cover the following:

• Top serverless providers
• Benefits of using serverless architecture
• Popular use cases for serverless architecture
• Biggest challenges in using serverless computing
• The #1 thing the community would change in serverless

1 - What serverless providers do you use?

These numbers speak for themselves. Amazon Web Services is miles ahead of everyone else in popularity among cloud providers. Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions have asserted a significant lead over the rest of the field, but they may not be out of reach just yet.

2 - What are the benefits of using serverless architecture?

Flexibility in scaling came out as number one. It’s no surprise really; it has been the selling point of serverless computing from the get-go.

The same goes for decreased system administration that ended up in third.

The more interesting part is that speed of development finished second on the list with 55%. It may be a less obvious benefit of serverless, but it’s certainly worth considering.

Cost of resources showed up among the top benefits of using serverless computing. We took note of this, because more than half of the participants consider the cost an advantage, even though you may hear the reverse argument. It probably comes down to context.

3 - What are your typical use cases for serverless architecture?

Figuring out where it’s best to use serverless is certainly something where the collective experience of the community is better than any one developer’s experience. The graph is fairly self-explanatory, so I won’t bore you with any more explanation.

4 - What are the challenges of using serverless computing?

So we get to the juicy part: what are the common issues?

Debugging is the biggest pain point by far. It’s directly caused by architectural complexity, which was voted as the second biggest challenge by itself.

Cost estimation is another challenge. It comes down to actual usage, so it is hard to estimate ahead of time. Serverless architecture is very cost-effective in most cases, but it can become more expensive than creating and maintaining your own server.

Vendor lock-in ended up as the fourth biggest challenge, which makes a lot of sense. There is enough difference between the serverless providers, that migrating from one to another isn’t worth the cost most of the time. It’s also next to impossible to correctly guess the time and effort it’d take.

+1 What would the community change in serverless services?

Testing and debugging needs help

The diagram about the challenges tells you the story: debugging in a serverless architecture is by far the biggest issue for developers in this field.

A solution for this may be to make it a more viable option to set up the environment locally. This would make for quicker, easier and more reliable testing, which of course helps with debugging.

The other way may be to build better tooling to achieve the same result remotely.

The existing options are far from perfect, so this is numero uno on the community’s wishlist currently.

Key takeaways

• AWS is the leading serverless provider
• The biggest upside of using serverless architecture is flexibility
• Serverless is most commonly used for rest APIs
• Debugging is the biggest issue for serverless developers, and the community craves a solution

And this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Check out the full state of Serverless 2020 report with 20+ serverless trends for more insight!

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