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Problem with knative and serverless in general, if you objectively look at it is that the market is quite small. Serverless is a nice way to create and deploy a

Problem with knative and serverless in general, if you objectively look at it is that the market is quite small. Serverless is a nice way to create and deploy apps in startups. Startups in general have their own existential issues, now if I have to setup a managed kubernetes cluster and then then deploy, I am adding more unnecessary layers to already burning pile of fire. For others they already have apps running, they want to port the platform as is on kubernetes. That itself is generally a struggle. I think knative is really cool to play around with, it quite fun but I would think twice using it in real world because there are lot of moving operational pieces, learning curves and abstractions. It is much more comfortable to just write simple services with confidence. I classify serverless, one push deployments, app runners in Heroku bucket. Heroku more less had 50mil ARR in 2020 [1], market is quite smaller actually. [1] https://getlatka.com/companies/heroku https://getlatka.com/companies/heroku

meekins 5y ago
I do custom enterprise software and there the story is somewhat different. In that landscape many existing workloads are either being migrated to VMs or containers in the cloud or replaced with new cloud native applications. Companies are eager to have as minimal on-prem setup as possible (mostly for legacy software too difficult or risky to migrate). For entirely new applications serverless solutions are usually the first option to be considered since they are very easy to operate. Many clients also don't have much expertise in-house for operating k8s so new workloads would be operated by outsourced ops teams or development teams themselves which is very expensive. Large enterprises also have formed some sort of "strategic partnership" or alliance with either Amazon or Microsoft so cloud agnosticism rarely enters the picture. In addition to being easier to operate, skilled development teams are also very fast to deliver on serverless since there's very little infrastructure-level things to worry about. The team can focus on business logic and delivering value from day 1. If you only look at Heroku I can assure you the market for serverless is much bigger and constantly growing.
- debarshri 5y ago
  Thanks for your insight. What happens to their existing applications, do they move them to serverless too? I am working on an enterprise software in the space. Would love you be in touch with you and get some insights.
  - meekins 5y ago
    The most common approach I've seen is lift & shift to a VM and possibly some devops pixie dust on top to adopt golden image deployments. My perspective is limited and evidence anecdotal but I've seen only one on-prem to serverless "migration" project so far and that was a complete rewrite. The original codebase was ~20 years old, had a tight dependency on an expensive proprietary database and a variety of scalability issues so it would have needed thorough rearchitecting anyway. A more common pattern is to do the lift & shift and incrementally either create new services or migrate existing ones to serverless where it makes sense (the strangler pattern).

meekins 5y ago

I do custom enterprise software and there the story is somewhat different. In that landscape many existing workloads are either being migrated to VMs or containers in the cloud or replaced with new cloud native applications. Companies are eager to have as minimal on-prem setup as possible (mostly for legacy software too difficult or risky to migrate). For entirely new applications serverless solutions are usually the first option to be considered since they are very easy to operate. Many clients also don't have much expertise in-house for operating k8s so new workloads would be operated by outsourced ops teams or development teams themselves which is very expensive. Large enterprises also have formed some sort of "strategic partnership" or alliance with either Amazon or Microsoft so cloud agnosticism rarely enters the picture. In addition to being easier to operate, skilled development teams are also very fast to deliver on serverless since there's very little infrastructure-level things to worry about. The team can focus on business logic and delivering value from day 1. If you only look at Heroku I can assure you the market for serverless is much bigger and constantly growing.

debarshri 5y ago
Thanks for your insight. What happens to their existing applications, do they move them to serverless too? I am working on an enterprise software in the space. Would love you be in touch with you and get some insights.
- meekins 5y ago
  The most common approach I've seen is lift & shift to a VM and possibly some devops pixie dust on top to adopt golden image deployments. My perspective is limited and evidence anecdotal but I've seen only one on-prem to serverless "migration" project so far and that was a complete rewrite. The original codebase was ~20 years old, had a tight dependency on an expensive proprietary database and a variety of scalability issues so it would have needed thorough rearchitecting anyway. A more common pattern is to do the lift & shift and incrementally either create new services or migrate existing ones to serverless where it makes sense (the strangler pattern).