Opportunities in the Wake of the AWS Juggernaut

From time to time, there is talk in the industry that serverless adoption is stalling. I do not believe this, and if you watched the opening re:Invent keynote by AWS CEO Andy Jassy, it is evident that AWS is continuing to win the majority of serverless business in the cloud today.

The number of Lambda serverless functions invoked each month is now in the trillions. This is an exponential growth over a six year period since Lambda debuted. In his keynote, Andy also noted that half of new applications on Amazon are now powered by Lambda. And while serverless is not strictly about Lambda, it is the gateway to many managed services on AWS, and hence everything serverless.

Credit: Building revolutionary applications the serverless way, Ajay Nair re:Invent 2020. Building revolutionary applications the serverless way, Ajay Nair re:Invent 2020.

This data alone should dispel any notion that AWS Lambda adoption is stalling. But we can re-frame serverless skepticism to recognize that the gap between where many organizations are now, and where they need to be, to be serverless, is too wide.

Moreover, the dizzying number of AWS announcements leads to a confusing cloud, with competing AWS services and technological choices that are difficult to navigate, both for developers and organizations. This leaves significant room for innovation for startups like ours at Nimbella.

Several of the serverless announcements are also an exciting validation for the technology and products we built and continue to improve at Nimbella, to create the easiest serverless cloud to use. We are already helping organizations accelerate their serverless journey, whether it is to AWS or to the cloud of their choice.

We all know, migration from one cloud to another is time consuming, and very expensive. In many situations, migration does not have a reasonable return on investment. So if you want AWS-like serverless capabilities on the cloud where you are now, I'd love to talk to you. The Nimbella team can show you how to accelerate your serverless cloud journey. Let us be your partners in unlocking the trapped potential in your organization and enabling you to deliver more value to your customers; faster and sooner.

Not every organization is structured to reinvent itself, or to move nimbly, in the way that AWS can. But, most organizations truly need to unlock their trapped potential so that it can be focused to deliver new value to their businesses. This is why an easier migration path is important. A bridge rather than a chasm is needed from where the majority of the enterprises are today, to the serverless future they need to get to.

AWS Console "eye chart". This is dizzying and confusing to developers.

What is sure is that AWS is expanding their portfolio faster than ever. And what was already a large and complicated cloud to use before this re:Invent, is now even more complicated to penetrate for developers. On this point, Corey Quinn, eminent Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, writes in his Last Week in AWS newsletter: "they’ve chosen to deliver new and often competing services. This has led to massive sprawl, customer confusion, and folks being unnecessarily driven away from the cloud."

The sheer volume of services and alternatives is mind boggling. If you're new to AWS and you see EKS, Fargate and now Lambda with containers, which do you use? How do you make that choice?

This is precisely what creates the opportunity for startups like ours at Nimbella, or Stackery and Serverless Inc. to name some others from the many AWS partners that are looking at wrangling AWS complexity.

Our goal at Nimbella is to take you from conception of your idea, to code in the cloud with as little friction as possible. We do this by tightly bundling, automating and optimizing the mapping of code to resources, all serverless, of course, so you can just build, collaborate, and run with an awesome experience. Our innovations make the amazing capabilities of the cloud more accessible and easier to use by developers of different skill sets, and on the cloud of your choice. Your cloud should be beautiful, and all services fully managed so that you can stop wondering what serverless is good for, and just build. This is why we founded Nimbella.

I am the co-founder and CTO at Nimbella. We have the technology and experience to help you succeed and accelerate your serverless transformation. If you doubt that the future of the cloud is serverless, I’ll change your mind. You can reach me on Twitter or in our Nimbella community Slack.