As the evolution of cloud computing continues at great speed, I’m making the perhaps obvious call that 2019 will be the year of serverless in the enterprise.

Why so bold David? Didn’t you see what happened to all the “year of Linux on the desktop” calls? I did! But the shift to serverless isn’t as significant or disruptive as a desktop environment change to our users. And hey, with Chromebooks taking off, perhaps it is the year for Linux too! :)

With a refreshed focus on both developer productivity as well as the popular adoption of microservice architectures within our applications, enterprise software delivery teams are more open to new technologies and methods to deliver than ever.

Serverless technologies have also matured a great deal in 2018 with Azure Functions going 2.0, Google Cloud Functions going GA in July, Cloudflare announcing Workers and a bunch of quiet AWS announcements around Lambda, like introducing support for .NET — serverless is increasingly catering to more general purpose backend computing needs.

Outside of the big cloud vendors, an ecosystem has sprung up to support everything from how we deploy code, to dealing with security and monitoring concerns as well as the troubleshooting of serverless applications. Seeing an ecosystem pop up so quickly around a new paradigm should give you comfort enough to start experimenting in your next application development initiative.

How about migrations?

We are seeing more bespoke ops tooling for cloud management and governance automation being developed by teams on serverless technologies during cloud migrations. The days of running a server just for cron.d, appear to be over. Save your OS licensing dollars, you’re going to need it: my second prediction for 2019 is the price of lattes is going up as a direct result of all the time you’ll save not patching servers.

_Figure 1 — After mass serverless adoption, the price of a flat-white is expected to rise._ Figure 1 — After mass serverless adoption, the price of a flat-white is expected to rise.

Summary

With traditional “ops” teams adopting serverless, as well as green-field application development in the cloud, the call for 2019 being the year of serverless is no stretch at all.

-David Colebatch, Chief Migration Hacker
Tidal Migrations