For the Love of Serverless

February 2025

I love serverless! Yes, it is cheesy for me to make a Valentine’s Day pun but it seemed appropriate for the occasion.

Serverless is something that I have been a passionate fan of for quite a while. It wasn’t always called serverless but the idea that one could deploy a runtime and not worry about infrastructure was always a win for me.

I used to have a server in my office during the college years. All the fun provisioning I had to do to get a LAMP stack running was always a pain.

But some people tell me that it’s awful. Builtin says that “the hype” is over. But this article makes the major mistake of confusing FaaS with Serverless. We really need people to stop doing this. Say it with me now “Serverless > Functions!”

InfoWorld recently had an article that had a more balanced approach. They mention that serverless isn’t a cure-all and I would generally agree with that. Even I will tell my customers that there are times when Kubernetes makes more sense that a serverless platform like Cloud Run. But they also take the same approach of limiting serverless to FaaS and starting with that premise makes things problematic.

TechBullion recently called out the advancements in serverless and it’s role in the next wave of cloud native innovation. Engineers addressing the cold-start issue, vendor lock-in becoming less of an issue, and more advancements in serverless is showing that it will be the next wave of cloud.

Snowflake recently talked about their serverless platform. For those who aren’t familiar, Snowflake is a cloud data storage company that now has ventured into AI. This isn’t purely a compute company, but a LARGE data company. This is less than functions!

CIO Magazine demonstrates how serverless can help Fintech companies modernize and save money. I encourage you to read the report but some highlights include seeing a cost improvement of about 35% and “time to market got shortened by 15% on average”. Financial industry is historically very slow to update their tech. Seeing this is promising and I would love to see more design patterns like this.

Of course we can’t forget about GenAI. Serverless cloud Koyeb is now offering Tenstorrent accelerators! Their hope is to make “inference-as-a-service” more standard (my wording) by supporting serverless AI applications. They seem to be aiming to take advantage of serverless’s low-latency but let’s not forget the developer platforms.

Is serverless dead? Hell no. Have we outgrown FaaS? Maybe. But serverless grew up too and we need to acknowledge this!

—Photo courtesy Monstera Production on Pexels—