Why Serverless Is the Future of Cloud Computing: Insights from Alibaba Cloud’s Leader

"Only by surpassing can we continue." – a guiding principle for Alibaba Cloud’s Serverless leader, known as 不瞋, who has spent a decade developing distributed systems and now heads the Function Compute (Serverless) product.

Serverless as the Next Step for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing will become the basic infrastructure for society and business, and using it should be as simple as turning on a tap. Serverless removes the need to manage servers, configurations, and operations, allowing users to pay only for what they use.

International developers have a stronger Serverless mindset, while many Chinese enterprises are still observing or hesitant due to concerns about security, stability, migration costs, and resource scaling.

Don’t Build Your Own Serverless Without Scale

Serverless offers elasticity, cost savings, and higher development efficiency. Traditional development involves many steps—code merging, environment setup, testing, and operations—whereas Serverless lets developers focus solely on function code.

Self‑built Serverless solutions often lack the reliability of cloud‑provider services. Small enterprises should use public‑cloud Serverless products rather than attempting to construct their own infrastructure, especially when traffic can surge to billions of requests during events like "Double Eleven".

Tricky Challenges of Serverless Adoption

Challenge 1: Business Lightweight Difficulty

Achieving true automatic elasticity requires scaling instances within seconds or milliseconds, which is hard for large, complex applications.

Challenge 2: Infrastructure Response Requirements

Service discovery and monitoring systems must handle rapid instance changes, shifting from hourly to per‑second updates.

Challenge 3: Lifecycle Mismatch Between Business Processes and Containers

Serverless platforms need standardized application lifecycles that align with container lifecycles, requiring proper readiness and liveness probes.

Challenge 4: Observability Gaps

When servers are invisible, comprehensive monitoring and self‑healing become critical; insufficient observability erodes user confidence.

Challenge 5: R&D Mindset Shift

Developers must move from thinking about fixed IPs to focusing on service versions and traffic‑centric operations.

Becoming the Serverless Users Need

Function Compute supports a variety of scenarios: web applications, AI inference, video and image processing, real‑time file and stream handling. Major customers such as Weibo handle billions of daily requests with millisecond‑level scaling, saving up to 60% of IT costs.

Start‑ups like LanMo leverage Serverless for massive video processing, achieving cost reduction, extreme elasticity, and zero‑maintenance operations.

The Next Decade’s Battlefield

The ideal Serverless offers richer product forms, superior elasticity, better tooling, lower costs, higher development efficiency, seamless migration, and a frictionless cloud experience. It enables developers to write code once and run it anywhere without learning new platforms.

From a front‑end perspective, Serverless expands responsibilities beyond UI to full‑stack application delivery. For back‑end engineers, it shifts focus toward core services, data capabilities, and system reliability.

Alibaba Cloud combines toolchains, community, and product capabilities to deliver a Serverless platform that truly serves user needs, aiming to become the "Serverless everyone needs".

Key Features of Alibaba Cloud Function Compute

Event triggers: integrates with OSS, SLS, MNS, OTS, API Gateway, CDN, etc., using a unique Callback mechanism to reduce asynchronous architecture complexity.

Supported languages: Node.js, Java, Python, and custom runtimes for Go, C/C++, Ruby, Lua.

User experience: web console and SDK for managing functions, plus an interactive CLI.

Service model: functions can be managed as services or applications, with parallel execution of multiple requests per instance, saving compute resources.