Serverless & the cloud wars- is the enterprise data centre dead?

Does serverless means no server? No, it means you don't have to operate a server to run an application. Of course, somewhere there has to be some sort of data centre (do you have a smart phone?). The cloud wars are both a battle between those that want to be your IT server and the more important one - between your servers and theirs. They have mighty weapons, not least global scale and influence. How can the enterprise data centre survive?

What promoted this post was news that Google have stood up and are taking on the threat of serverless head on - https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/cloud-services-platform-bringing-the-best-of-the-cloud-to-you.html .

(Note Google's inclusion of a service mesh - https://istio.io/ , severless needs help to thrive, and it is generating its own set of sub-systems.)

So why do we talk about Severless when it still requires a server? Serveless is an end point, an abstraction, a singularity of sorts, it defines a new beginning. Proper utility computing, available now as a commodity.

The commoditisation of this level of abstraction is at the heart of the current cloud wars. This is a three hundred year change, not a fashion, because the very nature of property (location) and ownership (identity) are what the cloud wars are really about. Just having bigger data centres that serve many applications in acceptable locations is insufficient. To link location, identity and the content being sold to you, you have to also govern latency (quality attenuation as I prefer to call it). It exists, no amount of fog/cloud/5G/digital/yaddayadda eradicates it. All they do is define physical limitations, thermodynamic limits if you like.

Latency is a natural law, a law of physics, it enables the tools of technology but also defines their limitations. Quality attenuation in computer systems is down to three things: Geography (distance in space), Variability of timely delivery (distance in time) and Serialisation, distance in technology (technical debt). Sheer volume is how we typically have moved beyond technical debt historically and faster, bigger machine made it seem that we can solve any other problem in space and time. Our user experience of poor connections, unpredictable response and crappy video conferencing tell us clearly and directly that scale alone is insufficient. Severless alone does not equate to a better user experience but it is a major pivot point.

Serverless computing provides huge benefits derived from commodification & volume. With that problem solved, latency limitations will reassert themselves as the real underlying problem. The enterprise data centre (or its colo equivalent) will not disappear into the cloud, it will evolve. It is rooted in identity and location and the limits of latency - the management of quality, not just quantity.