The Rise of Serverless Computing:
Operational, Security &
Financial Considerations
Joey Jablonski
As organizations move beyond leveraging just basic
compute and storage in the cloud, serverless comput-
ing is gaining more attention as a capability for facili-
tating rapid deployment of new applications without
the overhead of managing traditional infrastructure.
Serverless computing is being adopted for a wide
variety of uses, from traditional systems manage-
ment functions like managing backups, to mission
critical needs including data processing and micro
service adoption.
Serverless can be an odd term – There is always a
server! But, as depicted in Figure 1, all major cloud
providers have deployed their own flavors of server-
less that allow the deployment of application code
without the need to manage or interact directly with
the underlying operating system or hardware, and
removing the operational overhead of patches, moni-
toring and incident response. Serverless gets us
much closer to this goal of treating everything we do
as code, to facilitate full automation of deployment
and operations.
Initial Release
(Current Status) Features
of Note
AWS Lambda Preview 11/2014
(GA 5/2015) Sub second
metering
Google
Functions Preview 2/2016
(Still in Alpha) Cloud Pub/Sub
Triggers
Azure
Functions Preview 3/2016
(GA 12/2016) Open source runtime,
Webjobs DSK
Figure 1: Serverless Platforms Compared
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