It's been 10 years since AWS launched AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS! 🎂
At ServerlessDays Cardiff, I spoke about what building serverless applications means in 2024, a decade on from the launch of these core services.
Here are a few takeaways from the session of how I observe customers building in 2024:
- Serverless services are foundational to building on AWS.
What was astounding in 2014 is now a well-established way of building on the cloud, as Lambda processes tens of trillions of requests each month and over 2.4 billion ECS tasks are launched each week. What's more, as new waves of technology and use cases arise, I see customers reaching for serverless services to build their new applications. To take generative AI as an example, these are just a few customers building GenAI workflows with serverless: content generation at TUI Group, analyzing large volumes of unstructured data at Nasdaq, generating live commentary at Bundesliga)
- Serverless applications are part of heterogenous environments.
Serverless applications seldom run in isolation from other workloads. Even customers with a serverless-first strategy that use serverless whenever possible will have workloads that are on virtual machines, on premises, or on non-serverless containers. This could be due to application requirements, the application's stage of modernization, or other factors like acquisitions. Serverless applications need to integrate with all these workloads. To make that integration easier, AWS is launching new features like enabling Step Functions and EventBridge to call private API endpoints.
- Serverless shines at enabling evolutionary architectures.
In his 2024 EDA Day London keynote, David Boyne illustrated this idea well. When you're building any new application, it's inevitable that you will learn more about the domain and the requirements will change as time goes on. Choosing technology that is extensible and easy to change and evolve will help you incorporate that new knowledge as you go.
All in all, the underlying principle that serverless started out with of enabling customers to write and manage less undifferentiated code and infrastructure still holds true today.
You can check out the recording of the session I delivered with Tom Collins, Principal Software Engineer at the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, below.
Thanks so much to Tom and the ServerlessDays Cardiff organizers for a fantastic event! 🏴
You can also hear from AWS product leaders and serverless heroes on the 10 year anniversary page. Particularly cool is the original Lambda press release and FAQ (PRFAQ) from when the service was first being developed.
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