The Serverless Illusion

Obviously, serverless technologies aren’t an illusion. They are quite real. AWS kicked off serverless in 2014 with the launch of Lambda, which remains the category-defining service to date. Since then “serverless” has taken on a much broader meaning and virtually every cloud provider offers serverless run-times, databases, and integration services. So where’s the illusion?

As I discussed in a prior post (which since expanded into a talk and a chapter in Platform Strategy), illusions happen when abstractions hide relevant concepts and therefore set false expectations, for example, if a distributed system that is subject to latency and out-of-order delivery pretends to be just like a local system that doesn’t exhibit these run-time challenges. Developers may enjoy their initial, seemingly simplified, experience until inevitably the illusion pops and things break without them having much of an idea why. In a way, software illusions are the antithesis of mechanical sympathy: they pretend that the system is something that it isn’t and likely can’t be.

So, where does serverless fall into this trap? Doesn’t it do a nice job abstracting away infrastructure, so you can focus on writing business logic and providing value instead of toiling in the operational engine room, doing undifferentiated heavy lifting? Before we reveal that part, let’s take a tiny step back and look at serverless tech in context.

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