What may seem like science fiction is, in reality, the principle of serverless. Make the customer benefit from a fluid experience, which could almost make him forget the existence of the server. It’s the latest trend to explore, continuing efforts to make the cloud easier to use, more accessible, and more cost-effective.
Although there is still a long way to go before we can deploy entire applications via serverless, great strides have been made regarding the separation of functions and other services. The latest evolution of serverless allows businesses and organizations to eliminate a significant amount of overhead and routine work by automating various infrastructure-related tasks.
Serverless: the culmination
Over the past 20 years, the evolution of the cloud has mainly consisted of making solutions easier to use, allowing companies to scale and focus on their high value-added activities. We have moved from the era of Bare Metal to that of serverless. Whereas in the past it was normal to do everything yourself, it is increasingly common to leave (almost) all the work to the cloud provider. To better understand the different stages of this evolution, the best analogy is the one presented in the diagram below: “Pizza as a service”. She compares the different processes of creating software to preparing a pizza (from A to Z, from ready-to-use ingredients, pizza delivered to your home or restaurant).
Serverless is just the logical continuation of this evolution. Indeed, for the vast majority of companies, server maintenance is nothing more than a necessary expense for their presence on the Internet. They need servers, systems to manage data, and must ensure their security and confidentiality, but this is not their core business.
Server management consists of performing repetitive tasks that can easily be automated.
Marketplaces (or online marketplaces) offer a good example of a serverless use case. They are very similar from an infrastructure point of view: they all have a front-end website, an API that runs on servers, a few ETL tools, a database and a “data warehouse”. of data). Their workload is variable, which is why almost all of this infrastructure must be able to increase or decrease its power according to need. Opting for serverless computing and storage therefore means entrusting all the work to the cloud provider, with the exception, of course, of the business logic which makes the specificity of a marketplace.
Ultimately, automation, use of shared resources, and reduced need for in-house technicians will help lower operating costs for businesses. Enough to motivate the mass adoption of serverless.
Why Bare Metal hasn’t said its last word
If by “Bare Metal” we mean “computer room in the basement of the company”, then it is effectively obsolete, and has been for more than ten years. Due to the rise of the cloud, hosting your servers on-premises has become counterproductive due to complexity and management costs. Bare Metal is more expensive because you have to pay not only for a dedicated infrastructure, but also for technicians to configure and operate it.
That said, the cost is not the only criterion to weigh in the balance. Due to two other fundamental factors: confidentiality and performance, Bare Metal will remain relevant despite the existence of virtual machines (VMs), cloud databases and Serverless.
Confidentiality: who should you entrust your data to?
Companies that put their data in the cloud rely entirely on their provider. This requires an act of trust which makes more than one hesitate, and which is impossible for others because they hold data that is too sensitive to entrust to a third party. It is indeed difficult to imagine the secret services moving to the public cloud.
Moreover, secret defense organizations are not the only ones to be concerned about questions of confidentiality. More and more companies are concerned about data sovereignty and want to know who has jurisdiction over the data stored in data centers. Cloud users, especially those dealing with sensitive data, should therefore choose their hosts carefully. In this regard, the European cloud, whose providers are required to comply with very strict regulations on data protection, is meeting with growing success. Even so, it is likely that many organizations will continue to choose the apparent security of their own computer room.
Physical presence also plays a role, although less important. Indeed, organizations that are a bit “old-fashioned” like to be able to locate the physical place where their data is stored and find it difficult to accept that the latter is “we don’t know where, in the cloud”. This may make the new generation of cloud natives smile, for whom the cloud is a staple of modern computing, but this behavior presents a major obstacle for the development of cloud services, including serverless.
If companies and organizations are to be convinced to prioritize convenience and price competitiveness over control over their data, trust is paramount. Thus, the adoption of cloud services depends on the ability of providers to dispel doubts, prove themselves day after day and instill confidence in their operations.
Performance: the strong point of Bare Metal
If we can expect Bare Metal to endure for decades to come, it’s because of its performance. The cloud may be advancing rapidly, but the demand for ever more powerful computers continues to grow. But Bare Metal machines meet most of this demand.
A typical use case for Bare Metal is research: an organization specializing in the development of new technologies will need to perform simulations with significant parallelism and large volumes of data. Researchers will therefore have to use clusters of dedicated machines to run their code at scale, transferring and processing terabytes of data. This data must be distributed between Bare Metal machines on a dedicated network infrastructure, and stored in dedicated databases that perform well under all circumstances. For these organizations, more performance means more efficient research, faster product development and more predictability.
Dedicated compute clusters offer a marginal advantage, at the cost of a substantial investment, but which some are willing to finance for more performance and reliability. However, even if the demand for this type of machine has a bright future ahead of it, it essentially concerns use cases that consume a lot of resources and require a high degree of performance. However, for the vast majority, simpler and more affordable cloud services are sufficient to meet business needs.
The serverless decade
Serverless is the next stage in the evolution of the cloud, a new paradigm to explore that promises to make the cloud more accessible and easier to use than ever before. Will Bare Metal therefore become obsolete? The answer is no, for the same reason that the various cloud solutions that succeeded it could not replace it. These two technologies can coexist because they meet different needs, for different audiences.
However, as serverless expands and opens new doors, it will mark a turning point for consumers and businesses of all sizes by transforming the way the world thinks about and uses servers.
However, we should not expect serverless to conquer the whole world all at once. Its evolution will take place gradually, as the level of abstraction rises. It will still need to address privacy and trust issues, and challenge the status quo.
Either way, the 2020s will be known as the serverless years. They will see the rise of interest in serverless, an acceleration of its adoption and increasingly complex use cases.