Serverless and the Enterprise

I agree with your assertion that serverless is disruptive. And I agree that a vocal minority are generating a lot of FUD around this topic. I completely disagree with your assessment that enterprises aren’t embracing serverless due to risk.

Progressive enterprises are keenly aware of the risk of not leveraging emerging technologies like serverless architecture — it’s disrupt or be disrupted.

Just like all startups aren’t created equally, neither are all enterprises. There are just as many clueless startups and consultants feeding the FUD.

Over the past year, some extremely innovative serverless-based solutions have emerged from large enterprises including Artillery and Cloud Custodian. Some of the brightest engineers I’ve met are currently coding solutions within large enterprises.

These engineers do not sit and watch emerging technologies until someone else takes the risk and then hire a consultant — that is very far from the truth.

Many leading enterprises have legions of highly skilled engineers that seek access to beta services well before they are released to startups — and take great pleasure exposing weaknesses in trial versions. These engineers are often the first to exploit new AWS services at scale and contribute to improving existing AWS services to support scale (to the benefit of startups and consultants).

The serverless community isn’t defined by the size of a company, and neither is the adoption. The community should be spending less time trying to convince others about the benefits, and more time sharing and exploiting the advantages of being early adopters.

Regarding the naysayers, it’ll just be matter of time before they work through the swardley “no” → “oh no” → “oh f#@k” phases of adoption and become thought leaders on this topic.