The Rise of Serverless
The serverless computing market continues on a steep growth trajectory as more companies find compelling use cases for the technology. According to Markets and Markets, the global serverless architecture market size is projected to grow from $7.6 billion in 2020 to $36 billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate of almost 32%. Serverless allows teams to focus on writing code and building applications without spending time and resources worrying about infrastructure or operations. The managed nature of serverless also makes it simpler for companies to experiment, deploy changes quickly, and scale rapidly up or down based on real-time demands.
Key Benefits Driving Adoption
There are several key benefits leading businesses to deploy serverless architectures:
Cost Savings: With serverless computing, companies only pay for the exact amount of resources used to execute a particular function when it is invoked. Companies see significant savings by not having to overprovision capacity upfront to handle peak loads. Estimates show serverless can result in cost savings of 70-90% compared to running workloads on traditional servers.
Agility and Speed: Serverless enables faster development cycles and change deployment since developers don’t have to make requests to IT or wait for infrastructure modifications. New functions can be written and deployed in seconds. This leads to greater business agility.
Scalability: Serverless applications can automatically scale up or down based on usage, allowing them to easily handle sudden spikes in traffic or events like Black Friday without capacity planning. The service provider handles scaling seamlessly.
Operational Efficiency: Serverless offloads responsibilities like capacity provisioning, patching, scaling and more to the cloud provider, freeing up internal IT resources and allowing companies to focus innovation rather than maintenance.
Use Cases Emerging Across Industries
Companies across industries and of all sizes have found success using serverless for a growing list of use cases:
• Data processing & analytics
• Web & mobile applications
• IoT backends
• Chatbots
• Event-driven workflows
• API development
Leading cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud offer serverless platforms companies can build on. Industries leading serverless adoption include financial services, healthcare, retail, media & entertainment, manufacturing and more.
The Future of Serverless
As developers gain confidence in serverless and cloud providers expand their tooling and capabilities, adoption is expected to rapidly increase. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 75% of mid to large-size companies will have adopted some form of serverless computing. This shift allows companies to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and future-proof their architectures. While still evolving, serverless is proving to be an enterprise-grade solution able to power mission-critical workloads while unlocking agility, scalability and efficiency advantages. The promise and business benefits of serverless ensure it will continue its upward growth trajectory as a core cloud service model well into the future.