Exploring the Future of Serverless with Sheen Brisals: Why It's Becoming the New Norm
2022 was a phenomenal year. From getting off the claws of the pandemic to achieving newer milestones, AntStack has traversed significant trajectories. I want to mention two critical personal events that resonated with me powerfully – 1) Reading David Anderson’s – ‘The Value Flywheel Effect’ and 2) Keynotes at AWS re: invent 2022 by Mr. Adam Selipsky and Dr. Werner Vogels.
The Value Flywheel Effect is a happy marriage between Wardley Mapping, The North Star Metrics, and serverless technology. A must-read for all modern technology leaders who live and breathe digital transformation that builds newer systems requiring very little infrastructure focus. (I got a signed copy, yay!)
_Getting the signed copy of The Value Flywheel Effect from David Anderson_
The keynotes at AWS re: invent 2022 were brimming with insights on today and what the future holds. Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, spoke about the vastness of data and how it can drive the future of businesses to help make intelligent decisions today.
_Be prepared for anything._
Dr. Werner Vogels, the visionary, master storyteller of our time, and CTO of Amazon emphasised the importance of building systems based on event-driven architectures that are asynchronous in nature and loosely coupled. All these, so the systems can evolve and bring more value to the customers. Most importantly, they enable businesses to be prepared for anything – pandemic, economic downturn, or worse. (Did you also love his Lambda T-shirt?)
The world is event-driven, asynchronous, and loosely coupled.
Top 5 Serverless Predictions for 2023
Understanding the current technology landscape and applying all the learnings, here are my top 5 predictions for ‘Serverless in 2023.’
Data Engineering will be Re-engineered
The adoption of data engineering and data-driven decision-making is increasing year after year. With the maturity of serverless technology and newer and better services, it’s time to rethink how to re-engineer data in 2023. Data engineering is traditional and monolith in nature. Services like EMR and RedShift are complex and require large teams to manage them. With serverless, running map-reduce workloads is much easier without requiring a team of experts to build and manage the infrastructure.
The easy integration of serverless services with machine learning models will increase the adaption of data-driven decision-making with machine learning capabilities in 2023.
Product Engineering will be Redefined
As Dr. Vogels rightly said, the world is event-driven. It’s time for complex business applications to break down the monoliths into micro-services and the micro-services further into micro-functions.
Micro-functions, or event-driven architectures, enable businesses to exploit the full potential of cloud-native services (though I would like to call them serverless-native services). These reduce risks by decreasing your applications’ blast radius, making them more secure. These will increase the rate of turn for your organisation and shorten time-to-value.
Frictionless Developer Experiences will Become Indispensable.
As systems go serverless, the developer experiences will become more and more frictionless. With the announcement of the AWS application composer, a large chunk of the developer community will flock to build future serverless systems, increasing the adaption of our favourite AWS services and educating the world about the benefits of serverless systems.
Kubernetes to Serverless – Who’s Will Bell the Cat?
So far, application modernisation has been perceived as moving the business workload to containers or K8. In 2023, this status quo will be questioned, and companies will start asking – why not serverless? The decision-makers, still apprehensive if serverless is the right choice, will also start to question if K8 solves their problems. How about circling back about this at the end of the year?
Data Modernisation will be Inevitable.
Companies will soon realise that they are sitting on top of old, traditional data, which is not making any sense but is of value. 2023 will witness significant migrations from conventional data stores to modern data management systems like Google Big Query, Databricks, and Snowflakes.
The Industry Round-up
Some of the industries which are at the forefront of adapting serverless architectures are:
- Life Science, therapeutics, and pharmaceutical industries
- Digital entertainment industries like gaming, audio, and video streaming platforms
- Financial services companies, especially modern SaaS startups like InsureTech, payments, and fraud dedication and tolerance
- Logistics, transportation, and shipping companies
- Manufacturing industries for data analytics and machine learning models Oil and gas
- Design, engineering, and construction Industry Climate, geosciences, Social, economic, and governance and not-for-profit organisations
- Autonomous vehicles and telematics
- AdTech and customer data management
- Security SaaS companies
