Lightbend Podcast: Serverless Is Back (Again), with Viktor Klang

Has Serverless stalled out? Viktor Klang weighs in.

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In the InfoQ article “Why the Serverless Revolution Has Stalled”, the author, Bernard Brode, argues that serverless has stopped progressing, seemingly before it started. To quote: “Though many view serverless technology as a new idea, its roots can be traced all the way back to 2006 and the Zimki PaaS and Google App Engine, both of which explored a serverless framework. From limited programming language support to performance issues, there are four reasons the serverless revolution has stalled.

Those reasons are stated as:

• Limited Programming Languages
• Vendor lock-in
• Performance
• Can’t run entire applications (i.e. not general purpose-built for this)

In this podcast with Viktor Klang, VP of Cloud Engineering at Lightbend, we review this article in light of the advancements we’ve made with Cloudstate, the open source tool for distributed state management on Kubernetes for serverless architectures, and Akka Serverless, our upcoming hosted service for serverless.

We should note that while we at Lightbend may have a different perspective about the future of serverless than the author, we think this article is well-written and raises some excellent topics for discussion and cooperation. So, thanks to Bernard for bringing these areas forward!

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