Guide to Serverless Technologies: Free Ebook on The New Stack
The New Stack today is releasing its “Guide to Serverless Technologies,” the next ebook in a series on cloud native microservices and DevOps practices. This guide presents the results of The New Stack’s original research on serverless adoption trends and use cases. It also provides a high-level overview of what organizations should consider as they build, deploy and manage serverless functions and applications.
Serverless architecture is “serverless” in terms of the user/developer never needing to take care of, or even be aware of, any individual machines — the infrastructure is fully abstracted away. Developers can simply tap into a practically limitless pool of compute, network and storage via managed services from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, or via installed platforms such as Kubeless, OpenFaaS, OpenLambda and Apache OpenWhisk.
Serverless is pay-as-you-go, calculated according to actual consumption rather than pre-purchased services based on guesswork. So it can make for more cost-efficient application development. But the primary benefit of serverless is its speed of development, according to The New Stack’s 2018 serverless survey.
This 91-page ebook details the results of our serverless survey and explains the pros and cons of the serverless approach to software development in more depth. It was written by The New Stack journalists and includes research and commentary from more than 30 leaders and experts in the field. The topics discussed in the book’s nine chapters include:
- How to get serverless started in the enterprise.
- Serverless impacts on business, process and culture.
- How serverless changes DevOps and security practices.
- Serverless pricing and management.
Much More Than Hype
Serverless is more than just a technology. It’s also a movement. Barriers to entry are never more apparent than when a new technology comes along and knocks them down, and serverless is doing just that. It’s providing simple ways for developers to build new software, along with an accepting community that helps them along the path towards a better understanding of their craft and, perhaps, to become professional developers. Experienced programmers, meanwhile, finally get the chance to focus on writing code, instead of managing servers or sharding databases.
It’s not just hype: Half of the respondents to The New Stack’s 2018 survey said their organizations are already using serverless, and another 28 percent of respondents plan to use serverless in their organization within the next 18 months.
But as magical as these services can feel, making them work for your organization is anything but magic. It doesn’t make sense to just take today’s monolithic enterprise applications and foist them onto a serverless platform. First of all, it might not even work: The big name serverless platforms have some resource constraints that would probably stop most large applications from even running in their environments. But that’s beside the point. Serverless platforms aren’t designed to be yet another place to run the same old applications. They’re a way to build software in a different, more efficient way.
The New Stack aims to guide you through serverless technologies with this comprehensive resource that explains and analyzes how organizations build, deploy and manage them. It’s a human approach intended to help understand the dynamics of DevOps cultures, the engineers who manage them and the technologies they use. We hope you find the ebook useful and a way to think through the complexities that come when business goals, organizations, teams, workflows and technologies intersect.
