Who would not want to directly upload their code to the cloud, without Docker, Kubernetes, Chef, Terraform, OpenStack, VMware or Puppet in between. When looking at live-data on adoption and interest on serverless platforms the momentum of these serverless technologies becomes clear. This chart, directly generated through the StackOverflow Data Explorer, illustrates the speed of this growth and shows the ongoing dominance of AWS Lambda. Interestingly, in 2018, Google Cloud Functions gained the number 2 position in this race and is currently expanding this lead over Azure Functions (more research data available here) for a deeper dive and to obtain the research report.)

Amazon DynamoDB is leading the serverless database race, pulling ahead of Azure SQL Database in late 2017 and defending its lead ever since. Google Cloud SQL ranks third and seems to continuously fall back.

StackOverflow developer questions that are tagged with one or more serverless technologies available on AWS.

Hybrid Serverless as the Final Frontier

Hybrid deployments are the „Final Frontier“ for serverless applications and microservices. As this Google Trends chart shows, there currently is no clear winner in terms of open source frameworks for hybrid deployments, with Google-backed Knative showing significant recent momentum. However, Knative should be considered serverless-middleware, „upgrading“ standard Kubernetes to a framework for event-driven programming, but without adding developer tools found in higher-level platforms such as OpenWhisk or OpenFaaS.

More research data and a stream of continuously updated market info can be viewed on the EMA Top 3 site.

The complete EMA Top 3 for Serverless research report is downloadable as PDF from the EMA website.