Building Serverless Applications on Knative

Chapter 11. A Brief History of Serverless

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

While Chapter 4 explained much of the motivation for building applications using serverless technologies and Chapter 3 covered the underlying infrastructure that made serverless systems practical in the last 10 years, this chapter will indulge in a little archaeology to understand the direction of technological advancement and predict future advancements. Technological progress is not always linear and it often spirals around common needs and goals, like a staircase on the inside of a tower. With that tower of achievement in mind, we can triangulate between different steps along the way to find the central thrust of progress.

While these may seem very high-minded and abstract, each section covers one advance toward the infrastructure and concepts used by modern serverless systems. As we progress through a series of network-software milestones starting in the 1980s, we’ll see a series of progressive improvements in simplifying the work of implementing a network program by offloading capabilities onto supporting software services. As one of the founding platforms for the internet, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) family of Unixes hosted many of the early networking experiments that paved the way for today’s technologies. In the early 2000s, Linux took up the torch from the various other Unix vendors and continued as a platform for ...