Serverless in 2021: Trends, Challenges, and Choosing the Right Path

Wave of Serverless

Since Serverless emerged in 2014, major cloud providers like Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon, Baidu, and Huawei have launched their own services, seeking market share and new solutions. Global trends show steady growth, especially in China, where Serverless and micro‑services keywords continue to rise.

Alibaba Cloud leverages its early advantage, offering mixed reserved/elastic instances and prepaid models, expanding its user base and improving stability, as demonstrated during major shopping festivals. In July 2020, Alibaba Function Compute (FC) passed the Trusted Cloud Function certification with perfect scores.

Tencent integrates Serverless with its mini‑program ecosystem, enabling rapid user growth and seamless cloud capabilities.

Challenges

Developers face several obstacles when adopting Serverless:

Language suitability – Node.js and Python fit well with FaaS, while Java suffers from large memory footprints and slower cold starts.

Cold‑start latency – container‑based custom runtimes can take 2–10 seconds to become ready, impacting user experience.

Package size limits – most platforms cap deployment packages at ~50 MB, but full‑stack applications can exceed hundreds of megabytes.

Development workflow changes – file uploads, caching, and network isolation require new patterns.

These issues raise the question of whether existing applications can be easily migrated to Serverless.

Decision‑Making

Enterprises and developers must consider:

How to migrate an existing app to Serverless.

Whether the app must be refactored into functions.

How to maintain stability after migration.

How Serverless pricing aligns with business budgets.

Common migration paths use custom runtime solutions that expose an HTTP endpoint inside a container, but they inherit cold‑start penalties.

Cost Benefits

Real‑world cases show dramatic cost reductions: a customer moved from thousands of yuan per month on ECS to just 8 yuan on Serverless, a compelling advantage for small teams and individual developers.

Future Trends

Front‑end developers are splitting into two groups: those seeking low‑code, cloud‑native solutions, and those preferring incremental evolution of existing applications. Serverless frameworks continue to evolve, with YAML‑based configurations (Serverless Framework) and JSON‑based setups (Tencent Cloud Base) gaining traction.

{
  "envId": "fx",
  "framework": {
    "plugins": {
      "server": {
        "use": "@cloudbase/framework-plugin-node",
        "inputs": {
          "entry": "./api/index.js",
          "path": "/api",
          "name": "github-stats-api",
          "wrapExpress": true
        }
      },
      "pin": {
        "use": "@cloudbase/framework-plugin-node",
        "inputs": {
          "entry": "./api/pin.js",
          "path": "/api/pin",
          "name": "github-stats-pin",
          "wrapExpress": true
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Both Alibaba and Tencent are expanding their Serverless portfolios—Alibaba with Function Compute, SAE, Serverless Kubernetes, and ECI; Tencent with CloudBase, Serverless MySQL, and integrated resource bundles—aiming to attract developers of all scales.

Hope

Analysts predict that Serverless will continue to evolve to meet diverse business needs, offering both function‑as‑a‑service and application‑as‑a‑service models, while Chinese providers strive to lead globally.