Improving R&D Efficiency with Serverless: Goals, Obstacles, and Practices

Speaker Yang Zhengquan, a Serverless Center expert architect at Tencent Cloud, introduces the objectives and challenges of R&D efficiency governance and explains how Serverless can address them.

1. Goals and Obstacles of R&D Efficiency The primary goal is to accelerate value flow and shorten feedback cycles while validating problem hypotheses at low cost. Common obstacles include over‑focus on the problem‑solution stage, insufficient attention to feedback loops, infrastructure scaling limits, monolithic architecture, and fragmented team structures.

2. Serverless Concept Serverless abstracts away servers, offering pay‑per‑use consumption similar to ride‑hailing services, which reduces both server and operational costs. Tencent Cloud SCF supports multiple languages (Node.js, Python, Java, etc.).

3. Measures to Improve Efficiency

Infrastructure Management : Serverless hosts availability, disaster recovery, monitoring, and automatic scaling, eliminating manual capacity planning and reducing deployment time.

Targeted Investment (Domain‑Driven Design) : Allocate most R&D resources to core domains, use third‑party or cloud services for generic capabilities, and leverage FaaS + BaaS for finer‑grained reuse.

Team Collaboration : Adopt full‑stack teams, use Server‑Side Rendering to let front‑end developers implement back‑end APIs, and employ tools like Serverless Framework (YAML) for consistent environment provisioning.

4. Future Trends of Serverless Anticipated developments include "Serverless + X" product families (databases, middleware, containers), Serverless becoming the execution engine for SaaS applications, tighter integration with edge computing, and more mature development tools and methodologies.

The speaker concludes by summarizing these points and thanking the audience.