2021 Serverless Landscape: Trends, Research, and Industry Insights

Industry Perspective on Serverless

In 2021, Forrester’s Wave report highlighted Serverless as a major cloud computing capability, predicting massive migration of core applications to Serverless. Gartner listed Serverless among the top ten infrastructure trends in 2018, and CNCF’s 2020 survey showed 31% of organizations using Serverless in production.

Forrester and Datadog reports showed a 250% increase in Serverless usage, with Lambda calls rising 3.5 times compared to two years earlier, and average daily function runtime reaching 900 hours per enterprise.

Chinese cloud providers, especially Alibaba Cloud, achieved strong performance in Forrester’s leader quadrant, emphasizing product matrix, partner ecosystem, and customer scale.

Academic View of Serverless

UC Berkeley’s 2018 paper warned of challenges such as inefficient data processing and impeded distributed system development, while its 2019 follow‑up predicted Serverless would become the default computing paradigm for the next decade.

Research papers presented at USENIX ATC, SoCC, and other top conferences explored cold‑start optimization, image acceleration, scheduling strategies, and caching mechanisms, with notable works like FaaSNet and Faa$T addressing container image distribution and auto‑scaling caches.

Serverless Development Driven by Vendors

Major cloud vendors upgraded underlying architectures, with Alibaba Cloud migrating to the Shenlong architecture and launching Serverless GPU instances. Providers enhanced container image support, observability, and event‑driven integrations such as EventBridge, expanding event sources to nearly a hundred.

New runtime support, custom containers, and application hosting models emerged, addressing workload diversity and permission management needs.

Community‑Driven Serverless

Open‑source tools like Serverless Devs 2.0, Serverless Framework, and CloudBaseFramework advanced multi‑cloud deployment, vendor‑agnostic tooling, and developer experience. Frameworks such as Midway FaaS, Malagu, and FaasJS promoted Serverless‑first development.

Community events, meetups, and conferences proliferated, fostering knowledge sharing and encouraging academic‑industry collaboration.

Summary

Serverless has matured into a core cloud‑native paradigm, driven by both vendor innovation and vibrant open‑source ecosystems, with growing academic interest and expanding real‑world adoption across industries.