Why the Future May Not Be Serverless

“We assume that once we’ve given the problem over to someone else, often, we don’t have to think about it. Then hopefully we hit some level of success.

Then things start erroring. We don’t have visibility. We don’t have the rich tooling we’re used to. Things are breaking and we don’t know why. And we don’t know why we don’t know why. We just know people are complaining.” -Charity Majors

The current model for serverless, realtime services can be opaque and, in operation, has more in common with software than traditional hardware configuration. In this talk, Charity Majors and Mark Ferlatte explore alternatives to this trend. In their talk from Stream Conf 2016, Charity discusses what it means to think about operations in an age where it’s said that operations are archaic or no longer need to exist in the first place. Mark then shares a war story about building a product using ‘serverless’ technology.