5 Common Misconceptions of Serverless Technology

The rapid growth in serverless technology affords companies opportunities to save money on server costs and allows developers to save time and focus on coding rather than back-end operations. A challenge with such swift adoption is the difficulty in maintaining a standard understanding. In anticipation of the Serverless Conference, which was held last week in Austin, Texas, we asked experts in Heavybit’s community about common misconceptions.

Myth #1: Serverless is a Revolutionary New Direction for Software

“A common misconception is that it’s a revolutionary new direction for software,” says Nick Martin, co-founder and CTO at Meteor. “Really, it’s just the next step in the evolution of making software development faster and easier. Like the compiler, the database and cloud computing did in previous eras, serverless further abstracts away the complexities of modern app development and is part of an ongoing trend to free developers from entire classes of concerns.”

As for the benefits for developers, Martin notes that developers can now “focus on their application logic and avoid undifferentiated work like provisioning, server management, or load-balancing.” Serverless ultimately “promises to let developers ship apps faster and at a lower cost,” he says.

Myth #2: Serverless is a Gadget Technology for Hobbyists

Nick Gottlieb, head of Growth at Serverless Inc. believes that one of the biggest myths is that it’s a ‘gadget’ technology that’s not mature or only for a hobbyist. “While serverless compute is still a very early technology, it’s built on the same core infrastructure that providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft have been investing in and selling to enterprises for years,” says Gottlieb. Furthermore, “because the underlying infrastructure is battle tested, and the value it provides around cost savings and faster time to market are so great, there is already huge amounts of mission-critical enterprise workloads being done on serverless compute.”

Myth #3: Serverless Will Hurt the Movement Toward Containers

“Containers will continue to be front and center in terms of the underlying infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean they will be the primary unit of deployment for developers,” says Lawrence Hecht, author at The New Stack. “Take, for example, a cloud provider that may build its FaaS (function as a service) on top of containers and use Kubernetes to manage that deployment,” he says. “Individual developers would then deploy application components to functions instead of to container images.”

Hecht notes that this will not happen right away and in the meantime, “We’re seeing emerging companies build dashboards that allow developers to choose which VM, container or function they want to deploy to. Those dashboards are becoming the gateway to the CI/CD pipeline.”

Myth #4: Serverless is Free of Security Vulnerabilities

“The biggest security misconception is thinking you no longer need to worry about known vulnerabilities,” says Guy Podjarny, co-founder and CEO at Snyk. While serverless addresses the risk of known vulnerabilities in OS dependencies, such as OpenSSL’s Heartbleed vulnerabilities, “These ‘unpatched servers’ account for the vast majority of successful attacks today. Serverless applications still contain a large and growing number of application dependencies, pulled from npm, Maven, PyPI and more. These components often carry known vulnerabilities, and require diligent monitoring and preventative tools.”

Myth #5: Serverless Means No More DevOps

“A common misperception is that it completely absolves development teams from the harsh realities of operating software,” says Joe Ruscio, partner at Heavybit. “While it does promise to almost completely do away with the ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’ of provisioning and managing infrastructure, understanding how your application code performs in production remains of paramount importance.”