Serverless Curated List

Launched in parallel two and a half years ago by Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda and Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) are two distinct services that each offer a new, leaner way of accessing compute resources. Amazon ECS lets developers tap into container technology on a pay-as-you-go basis. AWS Lambda offers what is often known as ‘serverless’ computing, or function-as-a-service — the ability to access specific functions, again on pay-as-you-go terms.

Last year I wrote an article on what serverless computing is all about. In that article, I described that while serverless computing doesn’t remove servers, it moves the management of servers to the cloud computing provider, away from your development and IT organization. It removes complexity from application management and enables easier and more significant scaling by sharing server resources across a larger set of consumers.

But last year, when you said ‘serverless computing’, you were almost exclusively referring to Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) technologies such as AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. While there are other serverless technologies – such as serverless data stores and databases – these functional computing services were usually what you meant when you were referring to ‘serverless computing’.

I wrote not that long ago (see article in Diginomica) that the future of serverless is not Lambda, but is technologies such as AWS Fargate. I truly believe this is. Lambda is very useful for some kinds of computing needs, but it is not suitable as a general serverless solution to replace standard programming methodologies for building services and systems.