Serverless is somewhere between 3 and 6 years old, depending on who you ask, and in that time has grown from a concept to a fully-fledged movement. What has the Serverless community built and learned in this short history? What is the current state of the art?

More to the point, what is still to be understood, and where lie the significant challenges to mass adoption of Serverless techniques and services? What do we expect to change within the industry over the next year or so? And what will all of this hype lead to in the end?

Mike Roberts casts his independent eye over the landscape of Serverless to tease out answers, or at least well-informed opinions, to these questions. Since publishing his article about ‘Serverless Architectures’ on martinfowler.com in summer 2016, Mike has been dedicated to the cause of making software teams’ lives happier and more effective through the use of Serverless. While he sees many advances made in this period, he also realizes that we still have much work to do as an industry and community before Serverless can cross the chasm, to the mainstream.