This chapter is focused primarily on understanding the ingredients that have
come together to make serverless successful now and in the future. (I don’t
have a crystal ball, but the structural advantages of serverless seem likely to
continue until someone figures out an even better way to help developers build
scalable applications.)
Three main forces have combined to enable serverless to become a
popular paradigm. Today, many organizations still have large, business-critical
monoliths—even mainframe applications are a critical part of many industries!
Over the next 20 years, I expect to see serverless take a larger role in many of
these existing applications, living alongside the existing monoliths and
mainframes. This is great—most technologies don’t completely replace their
predecessors but offer new options that are better for new requirements. I
expect serverless to become the dominant paradigm for new applications
(including low- and no-code applications) and for clever technologists to
find ways for serverless to integrate with existing technology stacks. The mice
and the elephants will be living together, so to speak (Figure 4-1).
Figure 4-1. Serverless and the monolith
The two main drivers of serverless adoption are as follows:
Reduced drag on innovation
All infrastructure has some friction on its use, but serverless reduces the ...
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