Introduction: It is expected that in 2021, a large number of core applications of mainstream enterprises will be migrated from the original host architecture to the Serverless architecture.
Author | Liu Yu (flower name: Jiang Yu)
In 2021, The Serverless architecture began a new year of vigorous development in The Forrester Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2021 published by forrester. In the report, not only the world's mainstream Serverless platform is evaluated, but also a more scientific summary of past technological developments, and the future development vision of the product is prospected and explored.
As one of the key trends in cloud computing over the next decade, serverless architectures have shown great potential. Forrester believes that the rise of serverless architectures has made FaaS (Function As A Service) a new way to provide cloud computing capabilities after IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. It is expected that in 2021, a large number of core applications of mainstream enterprises will be migrated from the original host architecture to the Serverless architecture.
- In 2018, Gartner, a world-renowned IT consulting and research organization, released a report listing serverless architecture as one of the top ten technology trends that will impact infrastructure and operations in the future.
- In 2019, UC Berkeley stated in his paper Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing that "Serverless architecture will become the default computing paradigm in the cloud era";
- In 2020, the CNCF released the 2020 China Cloud Native Survey Report, in which it can be seen that the Serverless architecture is continuing to grow, with 31% of units using serverless in production, 41% being evaluated, and 12% planning to use it in the next 12 months;
- In the past 2021, there are not only forester, Datadog's reviews and reports, but also Serverless's trend of breaking through the bamboo, going against the current and booming in the process of COVID-19 affecting the global economic progress and technological development.
This article will review the development of serverless architecture, including but not limited to the evaluation and research of Serverless architecture by various organizations, the construction of Serverless architecture by various cloud vendors, the community development of Serverless architecture and ecological expansion. Review the development of the Serverless architecture in 2021, and make relevant inventory and summary of the development of the Serverless architecture.
Industry with Serverless architecture
1. Serverless architecture in the eyes of industry
2021 is a year of great concern for serverless architecture, this year is not only Forester, DataDog and a series of institutions, pay attention to the Serverless architecture; there are also academic research on serverless architecture has become more abundant; more all walks of life began to recruit Serverless architecture talents in the community and platform.
This not only shows that the Serverless architecture has undergone several years of development, gradually matured and been accepted by more people; it also more intuitively shows that the Serverless architecture has truly "been more widely concerned". This marks the beginning of Serverless architecture playing a more important role in driving cloud computing forward.
1) In March 2021, Forrester, an authoritative consulting organization, released its First Quarter 2021 FaaS Platforms (Function-As-A-Service Platforms) evaluation report
In this more rigorous scientific review, there are three cloud vendors in the leader quadrant, namely Alibaba, Amazon and Microsoft; there are also three cloud vendors on the list in China, namely Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei.
Although the commercial serverless architecture was first launched by AWS, Chinese cloud computing enterprises in the development of Serverless in advance of the card battle, quickly stepped into the forerunner ranks, in the report not only Alibaba Cloud Function Compute in a leading position, but also very high-ranking Tencent Cloud Function, with the product service matrix, partner ecology, and excellent performance in the customer scale dimension, was rated as a strong performer.
2) DataDog also released Serverless-related reports in 2021
In the report, DataDog believes that the use of Serverless has surged by 250%, which is why Serverless has once again been pushed to the forefront and has become the focus of many people's attention.
According to DataDog, businesses that have been using Lambda since 2019 have dramatically increased their usage. By early 2021, these companies will call functions 3.5 times a day than they did two years ago. In addition, within the same group of Lambda users, each enterprise's features run an average of 900 hours per day.
It can be seen that the business scale of serverless architecture is expanding rapidly, in addition to the content related to the number of users, this research report also includes many interesting information such as performance changes of serverless architecture, toolchain selection, runtime usage and so on. Through these data, it is not difficult to find that compared with 2020, the use of foreign Serverless in 2021 is rapidly expanding, the function execution time is increasing, the use method is becoming more and more mature, and the developer tools are more open.
3) In 2021, the employment opportunities of serverless architecture are gradually increasing.
Through a recruitment platform, it can be seen that in the past year, not only the major cloud vendors are recruiting Serverless talents, but also many industry head enterprises including Guangzhou Opal, Juhuasuan, Zebra Network, NetEase, Vonet Agora, Pinduoduo, etc., to recruit Serverless-related talents, which also fully illustrates from another perspective that the Serverless architecture is gradually popularizing and being adopted by more company teams. The related talent gap is also gradually emerging.
From 2012, after the concept of Serverless was formally proposed; in 2014, AWS led Lambda to open the commercialization of Serverless; then in 2017, major vendors have laid out the Serverless field; then in 2019, Serverless has become a hot topic in KubeCon and has been discussed by many people; to 2020 and 2021, various institutions have successively applied to Serverless Architecture for large-scale research, evaluation and reporting, many enterprises began to choose the Serverless architecture, so that it landed on a large scale.
Serverless is moving forward over time, and various technologies are advancing in a more complete and clearer direction. It is believed that with the advent of the 5G era, Serverless will play a vital role in more fields.
2. Serverless architecture in the eyes of academia
In the stage of rapid development of cloud computing, the form of cloud computing is also constantly evolving, from IaaS to PaaS, and then to SaaS, cloud computing has gradually "found the right direction of development".
In a 2012 article titled "Why The Future of Software and Apps is Serverless," written by Ken Form, vice president of Iron.io, he put a new perspective on it and brought the word "Serverless" into the public eye for the first time. ：
Even though cloud computing has gradually emerged, everyone is still revolving around servers. However, this will not last long, and cloud applications are moving towards serverless, which will have a significant impact on the creation and distribution of applications.
1) 《Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back》
In 2018, Serverless is growing faster than expected, and in this year UC Berkeley published this article expressing concerns and challenges about the Serverless architecture.
The points made in this article are:
By offering autoscaling capabilities, today's FaaS products take a big step forward in cloud programming by providing a virtually manageable, seemingly limitless computing platform. However, they overlook the importance of efficient data processing; second, they hinder the development of distributed systems.
Any new technology or concept will encounter certain challenges and concerns, just as when cloud computing appeared, it was also considered by some people (such as Oracle President Larry Ellison, GNU initiator Richard Stallman) as just another commercial hype concept, nothing new, even stupid.
Of course, it turns out that any new thing can only thrive after experiencing various challenges and questions, and Serverless is no exception.
2) 《Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing》
In 2019, a year later, UC Berkeley re-published an article on the Serverless architecture, in which the authors assert that Serverless will be rapidly adopted and rapidly developed over the next decade.
And a more aggressive assertion of the Serverless architecture:
"Serverless will become the default computing paradigm in the cloud era and will replace Serverful computing, which also means the end of the server-client model, and the Serverless architecture will lead the next decade of cloud computing."
In academia, not only has UC Berkeley published many papers on Serverless, but many domestic and foreign universities have invested enough energy in the field of Serverless to conduct scientific research and exploration. At present, Serverless has become a research hotspot in the academic community, and every year Serverless architecture related papers have a more obvious growth trend:
In 2021, the number of papers on Serverless architecture in academia will not only rise again, but also its research content and direction will become more and more perfect and comprehensive, including but not limited to cold start optimization, image acceleration, scheduling strategy, caching mechanism and many other hot issues.
3) 《FaaSNet: Scalable and Fast Provisioning of Custom Serverless Container Runtimes at Alibaba Cloud Function Compute》
Take the paper published by the Alibaba Cloud Function Compute team and george Mason University Leap Lab in collaboration with the TOP CONFERENCE USENIX ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference).
In this article, we explore the problem of "image pull and cold boot optimization" after the container image ecology is combined with the Serverless architecture. In terms of accelerating the distribution speed of images, the common industry-mature P2P solutions do not achieve function-level awareness, and the topology logic in the cluster is mostly a fully connected network mode, which puts forward certain requirements for the performance of the machine.
These pre-settings are not suitable for the implementation of FC ECS systems, so a lightweight system middleware with high scalability FaaSNet is designed and proposed, FaaSNet uses the image acceleration format for container distribution, and the target scenario is large-scale container image boot (function cold boot) under the burst in FaaS.
The core component of FaaSNet consists of the Function Tree (FT), a decentralized, self-balancing, binary tree topology in which all nodes are all equivalent.
FaaSNet can achieve real-time networking according to the dynamics of workload, without the need for pre-workload analysis and pre-processing, thereby helping the Serverless platform unlock the technical bottleneck of high scalability and fast image distribution speed, and enabling more in-depth and extensive applications of custom container image scenarios.
4） 《Faa$T: A Transparent Auto-Scaling Cache for Serverless Applications》
In addition, as the top conference in the field of cloud computing, SoCC, in the papers received in 2021, we can also see the shadow of many Serverless architectures.
For example, in the paper using Microsoft Azure Functions as an experimental platform, aiming at the characteristics of function stateless in the Serverless architecture and the Cache problem of the FaaS platform, faa$T for automatic scaling distributed cache for Serverless applications is proposed, which can greatly improve the performance of Serverless functions. Faa$T can reduce the vast majority of overhead compared to existing methods of using external storage as a Cache system.
5）《ServerMore: Opportunistic Execution of Serverless Functions in the Cloud》
This article describes a server-level Resource Manager ServerMore that addresses the short execution time and low resource requirements of Serverless functions. Serverless functions can be scheduled to perform tasks on the same physical machine as Serverful's virtual machines, and ServerMore dynamically throttles cpu, memory bandwidth, and LLC resources on the server to ensure that hosting between Serverful and Serverless workloads does not affect application tail latencies.
By selectively using the Serverless architecture and inferring the performance of serverful workloads relative to black boxes, ServerMore improves resource utilization by an average of 35.9% to 245% compared to the previous pattern, with minimal latency impact on Serverful applications and Serverless architectures.
In the past year, the academic research of Serverless architecture has become increasingly hot, and many excellent Serverless architecture related papers have appeared at the top of various fields, which not only contributes to the prosperity of serverless academic ecology, but also helps to break through the technical bottleneck of Serverless architecture and achieve technical architecture upgrades in the field of cloud computing.
In addition, in 2021, the domestic Serverless book monographs have gradually increased, and in just one year, books including "Front-end Serverless: Serverless Architecture for full stack", "Serverless from Beginner to Advanced: Architecture, Principles and Practice", "Serverless Engineering Practice: From Beginner to Advanced", "Huawei Serverless Core Technology and Practice", etc. have been published. It has greatly enriched the data ecology of Serverless training and education in China.
With the development of time, Serverless architecture plays an increasingly important role in more fields, while being paid more attention to, Serverless architecture has gradually become the research object of many scholars and laboratories, how to organically combine academic and industrial, how to empower academic scientific research through industry, iterative upgrading of industrial technology architecture through academic scientific research, and empower the entire industry to move forward, which is not only what Serverless architecture needs to do. That's what today's Serverless architecture is doing.
Serverless architecture development
1. Vendor-driven Serverless architecture
Although THE CNCF released CNCF Serverless Whitepaper V1.0 in 2018, clarifying the technical overview of Serverless, the state of the ecosystem, and developing relevant specifications and standards, today, the Serverless architecture is still primarily driven by cloud vendors in more ways.
On the one hand, it promotes the upgrading of technology iteration, on the other hand, it promotes the landing of Serverless architecture in more fields; in today's cloud computing competition, the ability performance of Serverless architecture in different vendors, the speed of update iteration and future development planning are also extremely fierce.
In the past 2021, various cloud vendors have worked hard and hard in the Serverless space, and from the perspective of the FaaS platform, in the past year:
- In order to obtain higher performance, many cloud vendors have begun to upgrade and innovate their underlying technology architecture on a large scale, including: Alibaba Cloud Serverless's large-scale migration to the DPCA architecture and the release of Serverless GPU instances at the 2021 Yunqi Conference; Yuanrong, as the kernel of HUAWEI CLOUD Serverless, came to the front of the stage from behind the scenes and released FunctionGraph 2.0;
- In order to further integrate the Serverless architecture and container image ecology, major vendors have made support for the serverless of container images, and AWS Lambda continues to exert efforts at the container image level, and currently supports the deployment of 10G mirror serverless;
- To achieve better observable results and help businesses and developers get detailed status of resources more quickly, AWS Lambda officially launched Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights in December last year, and has since continued to update to support AWS Lambda container images and AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors in April and November 2021, respectively Alibaba Cloud Function Compute is also constantly updated and iterative in terms of observability, and has carried out more detailed processing and analysis of more performance indicators, anomaly indicators, and tracking indicators, and has also made more delicate support for asynchronous calls, in addition to the industry's first instance-level indicators;
- At the event ecosystem level, AWS Lambda has strengthened the integration of SQS, MSK authentication and other related event sources in the past year, and further strengthened the integration with EventBridge to provide a unified access surface to support EDA architecture application development; Alibaba Cloud Function Compute chose to deeply integrate with EventBridgt at the beginning, and connected the event sources of Alibaba Cloud ecosystem and customer saaS systems through standardized and unified methods. Quickly expand its event ecosystem from dozens of event sources to nearly 100, and through eventBridge triggers, it can provide developers with rich event source triggering capabilities, empower more business scenarios, and help customers integrate with the Serverless ecosystem more conveniently;
Of course, in the past year, the development of Serverless architecture is rapid, although the above cloud vendors in the underlying technical architecture, container image ecology, observability, event ecology and other aspects of a simple summary, but in fact, in 2021, the cloud vendors in the Serverless architecture, especially the FaaS platform efforts and not only that, the launch of AWS Lambda Extensions, Alibaba Cloud function computing instance landing, Tencent Cloud Functions has added new web function types, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud CFC has gradually supported functions such as single-instance multi-concurrency...
As UC Berkeley's "default computing paradigm in the cloud era", the cloud vendors, in 2021, can be said to be in all aspects of the serverless architecture. Of course, from the perspective of FaaS alone, it is not difficult to find that in the process of updating and iteration of various cloud vendors, there are several important routes that gradually become clear:
- The event ecology is gradually enriched, especially the integration of messaging middleware and FaaS platform is becoming more and more close;
- The relationship between the FaaS platform and the container ecology is getting closer and closer, and the support for the container ecology is getting stronger and stronger, and the degree of support is getting more and more perfect;
- New runtime support, the old runtime has gradually become one of the burdens faced by the FaaS platform, and various cloud vendors are not only trying to support more updated runtimes, but also trying to expand their own Custom Runtime and Custom Container application scenarios;
- Traditional framework migration has gradually become a relatively clear scenario support, and most cloud vendors have begun to introduce traditional framework migration solutions and Serverless deployment solutions;
- As an important part of the Serverless architecture, the FaaS platform has gradually failed to meet more business deployment scenarios under Serverless, and the application hosting model is emerging. Although in the past, some articles have questioned that this model does not conform to the spirit of Serverless, but the fact and time has proved that the application hosting model is an indispensable technology selection in the development of serverless architecture;
- Whether it is SAM launching machine learning inference templates for AWS Lambda or Alibaba Cloud Function Compute releasing GPU instances, support for scenarios has gradually become one of the important directions and goals of technology upgrading and iteration;
- Because the FaaS platform may make business resources more fragmented, the need for more delicate and scientific permission management is gradually emerging;
Serverless is the main form of cloud computing in the next 10 years, driven by cloud vendors, Serverless architecture in addition to the Rapid Update iteration at the FaaS level, in the BaaS level is also constantly accelerating the pace of progress.
With the concepts of cloud native and Serverless gaining prominence, event-driven has once again become a buzzword in the world of cloud application architecture. In 2018, the Gartner Evaluation Report ranked Event-Driven Model as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends, and event-driven architecture (EDA) will become the mainstream of future microservices. The report also makes the following predictions:
By 2022, the software model for event notifications will be the solution for more than 60% of new digital commerce, while by 2022, more than 50% of business organizations will participate in the ecosystem of event-driven digital business services;
In May of the same year, the Cloud Native CNCF Foundation hosted the open source CloudEvents project, which aims to describe events in a unified and standardized format to enhance interoperability between different services, platforms, and systems, and the importance of events in the cloud-native landscape is self-evident.
In the past year or so, the efforts of various cloud vendors in the event ecology can be seen. Taking Alibaba Cloud as an example, after the launch of the EventBridge event bus in 2020, it has been continuously upgraded and iterated in the past year, and nearly 100 kinds of event access have been added successively. From IaaS to PaaS, hundreds of millions of events are generated every day and are more deeply integrated with Function Compute, while on AWS, the EventBridge product has had updates on average every month over the past year, including updates and iterations of CloudWatch Synthetics' ability to support Canary events using Amazon EventBridge and sharing events across event buses in the same account and region.
In addition to the continuous improvement of the event ecology, the infrastructure of the Serverless architecture is also being rapidly built, Serverless DB has become one of the focuses of exploration by many manufacturers, and the workflow has gradually become a "place where soldiers must compete".
With the slogan of All on Serverless, Serverless First, Serverless Faster, over the past year or so, we have to lament the speed of technology development and the growth rate of the vendor-driven Serverless architecture.
2. Serverless architecture driven by the community
The development of serverless architecture is inseparable from the drive of cloud vendors, and even more inseparable from the support of the open source community. In the past 2021, whether it is the continuous attention and empowerment of the Serverless architecture by foundations such as the CNCF, or the construction of the Serverless architecture by other Serverless communities and open source projects, the Serverless architecture is gradually becoming a more versatile and better-used technical architecture, becoming a simpler and more valuable technology selection.
1) Construction of tool chains
In the past year, as an emerging Serverless toolchain project, Serverless Devs open source tools have officially released version 2.0, from the slogan of "no vendor lock-in" to gradually building a "Serverless application lifecycle management tool".
From multi-cloud deployment support, to open source toolchain construction, to open Serverless community building, from the official release of serverless Devs Model, to the launch of the shortest path migration solution of traditional frameworks under the Servelress architecture, to the bold exploration of Serverless application debugging, local debugging, end-cloud joint debugging, cloud debugging and other functions have been released, and finally to industry-level solutions that support multi-cloud Serverless Application Center construction and launch, Serverless Devs is through the power of the open source community, to create an open source and open Serverless toolchain system, to create a vendor-free lock, and allow developers to use the Serverless architecture like a mobile phone.
When it comes to the construction of serverless toolchains, it has to be said that Serverless Framework, as an overseas veteran Serverless toolchain open source project with more than 40,000 Stars.
Serverless Framework in the past year, but also in the intensive update iteration, from the Plugin version to the Component version of the update upgrade, Serverless Framework in the country and Tencent cloud function cooperation is closer, in the past year, Serverless Framework whether from the Cli Design level, or from the functional support dimension, Or from the enterprise-level development and application level, bold exploration and brave attempts have been made, and in China, the Serverless Application Center service has been launched in conjunction with Tencent Cloud Function to provide developers with more convenient application deployment channels and application management capabilities.
Of course, in addition to the multi-cloud developer toolchain system at home and abroad such as Serverless Devs and Serverless Framework, many Serverless-related open source toolchain systems at home and abroad have also undergone rapid iteration and upgrading in the past year, including AWS SAMCLI, CloudBaseFramework, etc. It is worth mentioning that cloud-native integrated deployment tools CloudBaseFramework, as a very promising developer tool, has also made a lot of contributions to the open source cause in the past year, including but not limited to the open source of cloudBase CMS content management system.
2. Serverless development framework
In addition to open source at the tool level, the open source framework with Serverless First as the core has also flourished in the past year, with the old, Midway-based IoC system design, reusing the original decorator and decoupling capabilities at the same time, decomposing the code into different functions and releasing it to Midway FaaS on various cloud platforms; there is also a TypeScript-based Serverless First, componentization, Malagu, a platform-independent progressive application framework; of course, there are also excellent frameworks such as FaasJS that iterate over 150 versions a year.
In the past year, the open source community has contributed not only the Serverless development framework, but no matter from which point of view, it is not difficult to find that as the Serverless architecture gradually becomes the technical selection of many businesses, the migration and deployment of the traditional framework Serverless architecture and the serverless First framework system as the core idea reflect each other, becoming the main developers faster to use, more simple and practical, more convenient to get started An important connection point for the Serverless schema.
In addition to the construction of the toolchain, the Serverless framework is also booming, in April 2021, Baidu function computing engine EasyFaaS officially open source, as a light, adaptable, resource-intensive, stateless and high-performance function computing service engine, EasyFaaS has also become another excellent open source function computing engine after openWhisk, Knative and many other open source Serverless platforms.
3. A more prosperous community ecology
In 2021, in addition to the vigorous development of open source projects, Serverless's community is also becoming more and more lively, not only can all kinds of industry top conferences see Serverless topics at any time, Serverless Days conferences are held again, and Serverless Developer Meetup has been held in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities, and set up Serverless city stations in corresponding regions to establish a domestic Serverless Community of 1000. At the level of Serverless architecture empowering universities, the Serverless Developer Meetup community entered Hunan University for the first time, Huawei's Serverless campus open class activity Huazhong University of Science and Technology Station, and Tencent Cloud Cloud Development Campus Evangelist Cultivation Program.
In summary, it is not difficult to find that the community route of the Serverless architecture is relatively clear:
- The Serverless architecture community has very good open source projects in many aspects such as tools, frameworks, and computing engines that are constantly updating and iterating; for now, the Serverless toolchain pays more attention to the construction of vendor-free locking, enterprise-level solutions, scenarios and application centers; the Serverless open source framework is more based on Serverless First as the core of the idea;
- In addition to the prosperous open source projects, the Serverless community also has gradually become lively with community activities and communities. Through the activities of various open source organizations, through various conferences and serverless architecture collisions, so that serverless architecture by more people pay attention to, more people participate in it;
From open source tools to open source frameworks, from vendor-free lock-in to Serverless First, from open source computing engines to community meetings, developer activities are becoming more and more frequent and lively, from enterprises to colleges and universities, empowering the education industry to continuously break through and innovate in the field of cloud computing. In the past 2021, the Serverless architecture, driven by the community, has gradually begun to move forward at a more solid pace towards the future.
summary
With the development of cloud services, computing resources are highly abstracted, from physical machines to cloud servers to container services, computing resources have gradually become more delicate.
Since the word Serverless was first introduced to the public by Ken Form in 2012, the Serverless architecture has been constantly updated and iterated, constantly improving and evolving in a "realization of the original dream of cloud computing".
As 2021 quietly passes, serverless architecture is gradually taking steps towards its tenth year.
With the definition of serverless architecture continues to be complete, the event ecology continues to be enriched, the industry and academia pay more and more attention to the Serverless architecture, the open source community is becoming more and more perfect and lively, serverless architecture is no longer "can be viewed from a distance and can not be played", but can really help developers to put more energy on more valuable business logic, can make business development more focused, reduce the business innovation cycle, Technology selection that improves the comprehensive efficiency of the business and is grounded.
From IaaS to FaaS to SaaS to today's Serverless, the evolution of cloud computing has changed dramatically in the last decade or so. From virtual space to cloud hosts, from services such as self-built databases to services such as cloud databases, the development of cloud computing is rapid, and the Serverless architecture is also highly expected by many people.
As predicted in gartner's report: by 2025, half of the world's enterprises will adopt FaaS deployment; perhaps, today's Serverless architecture is still not the final form of Serverless architecture; perhaps the spirit of Serverless also needs to be further built and improved, but it is undeniable that Serverless architectures are on the way forward:
“More and more energetic, more and more fast and powerful.”
The author says:
When receiving the invitation to write a technical review of Serverless Architecture in 2021, the author himself is both excited and scared, afraid of burying some excellent events, although today's Internet information is rich, after further study and research, completed this article, but it is undeniable that there may still be omissions in this article, I hope you can not hesitate to teach, but also welcome you to learn and communicate together in the comment area. The author himself will continue to learn and improve the relevant knowledge areas.
In addition, the above content is only a partial summary of the author's own study and life, its views are only the author's own views, does not represent the company, school and the published platform views, in addition, part of the information in the text comes from the network, and has not been strictly verified, if there is a violation of objective truth, also welcome to point out. Finally, I very much hope that students with different views can discuss with me, and hope that more people will participate in the construction of serverless architecture.
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