IDG Contributor Network: 2017: The year of serverless?

As we embark upon a new calendar year, the blogs are full of navel-gazing looks back at the year just past and crystal ball perspectives on what is yet to come.

While I don’t go much for those sort of articles, having spent a few weeks recently in Israel and coincidentally talking with a bunch of people about serverless computing, it seemed a timely moment to reflect a little on something that humans suggest is the biggest thing since the advent of virtualization.

Serverless, for those unaccustomed to the term, is also known as event-driven infrastructure. Essentially it differs fundamentally from previous approaches towards infrastructure (physical and virtual servers and containerization) in that, rather than thinking about infrastructure as a series of increasingly compact units of computation, serverless thinks about inputs and actions. Serverless architectures, rather than articulating an “I want to achieve an outcome hence I need to create a unit of computation” instead come from a paradigm of “this input occur and therefore this action will be executed.” Serverless is therefore entirely focused on an output rather than the means to that output.

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