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Part of a ZDNET Special Feature: Prepare for Serverless Computing
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Research: Serverless computing holds promise for tech leaders, but results are mixed

A recent Tech Pro Research poll shows that despite enthusiasm for serverless computing, some enterprises experience issues with the services.

Special Feature

Serverless computing holds promises of flexibility and efficiency as well as cost and time savings, but does this technology measure up with tech leaders?

In April 2019, ZDNet's sister site, Tech Pro Research surveyed 159 tech professionals to find out why companies use -- or do not use -- serverless computing services. Survey questions covered a range of topics, including cloud service providers and the benefits and drawbacks of using serverless computing.

SEE: Prepare for serverless computing 2019: IT leaders need more convincing to use serverless computing services (Tech Pro Research)

According to the survey, 47 percent of respondents currently use serverless computing services, while 9 percent plan to use the services within the next six months. Current users are taking advantage of the services for web app development, business logic, database changes, batch jobs or scheduled tasks, IoT, and multimedia processing.

However, despite the myriad functions serverless computing provides, 28 percent of survey respondents have no plans at this time or in the future to use the services, and 16 percent of respondents are waiting until sometime beyond the next 12 months to use the services.

As with many new innovations, security concerns topped the list of reasons why companies are not implementing serverless computing services. More than 20 percent of respondents either have no apparent business need for serverless computing services or are uncertain of how to effectively apply the technology. Cost concerns rounded out the list of reasons preventing respondents from using serverless computing services.

SEE: Top cloud providers 2019: A leader's guide to the major players (Tech Pro Research)

Of the respondents who currently use these services, 16 percent have not experienced any issues with serverless computing; however, the remaining respondents indicated challenges with the services. A third of respondents listed vendor lock-in as their biggest issue, while other respondents found serverless computing more difficult to work with than expected. Respondents also noted difficulties in testing applications, additional development complexity, and lack of specific code or language support.

There are numerous serverless computing services providers, most of which are big-name players in the cloud services field like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Service, and IBM Cloud.

The infographic below contains selected details from the research. To read more findings, plus analysis, download the full report Prepare for serverless computing 2019: IT leaders need more convincing to use serverless computing services(Tech Pro Research subscription required).

serverlesscomputing-04222019-infographic.jpg

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