The State of Serverless 2020

Datadog (one the largest monitoring services in the cloud market) have just released their “State of Serverless” report. It compiles data from thousands of their AWS-using customer organisations and has some very promising results that show a bright future for serverless adopters.

If you don’t have time to read the full report right now, I’ve summarised the results as bullets below.

One caveat to keep in mind is that this report was restricted to Datadog’s customers who, in their own words, “tend to be serious about software infrastructure and application performance” and “skew toward adoption of cloud platforms and services more than the general population”.

• Half of AWS users have adopted Lambda — “This adoption rate… shows that Lambda is no longer limited to cloud-native early adopters or niche use cases”
• Lambda is more prevalent in large environments — “We see a clear correlation between Lambda adoption and the scale of a company’s infrastructure environment… Among the companies with the largest infrastructure footprints, more than three quarters have adopted Lambda.”
• Container users have flocked to Lambda — “nearly 80 percent of organizations in AWS that are running containers have adopted Lambda”.
• DynamoDB is the most called service from a Lambda function.
• SQS is the top choice for a message queue in Lambda requests, followed by Kinesis then SNS.
• Node.js and Python dominate among Lambda users — “47% of all deployed Lambdas currently run Python, with another 39% running Node.js applications”.
• The median Lambda function runs for 800 milliseconds — “One quarter of Lambda functions have an average execution time of more than 3 seconds, and 12 percent take 10 seconds or more.”
• Half of Lambda functions have the minimum memory allocation — [Paul: This generally is NOT what you should be doing as less memory==less CPU==longer execution times]
• Two thirds of defined timeouts are under 1 minute
• Only 4% of functions have a defined concurrency limit

A few good Twitter threads sparked from this report that you may wish to check out:

• Chris Munns (serverless advocate-in-chief at AWS) adds a few interesting observations on how some of these results generalise to the AWS customer population as a whole
• Fintan Ryan (director at Gartner) adds his thoughts

Here’s the link again to the full report: https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-serverless/.

— Paul.