Omdia: Serverless is the largest enterprise spend in cloud native computing

LONDON, October 10, 2023 – New data from Omdia’s CNC Tracker, a pioneering analysis of the cloud native computing (CNC) market has found that serverless computing is dominating the CNC market, and that serverless is forecast to continue its dominance, growing its market share over next five years. 

Serverless computing, that includes function-as-a-service (FaaS), is a cloud service where the hardware infrastructure is hidden from users, so that they do not have to be concerned with provisioning, administration, and maintenance of infrastructure. Instead, they can focus on application logic deployed as event-based functions and charged pay-per-use. Serverless services cloud providers have extended the range of serverless beyond FaaS to include other infrastructure in serverless mode such as database and storage. 

AWS leads the market at 45% followed closely by Microsoft Azure at 33%, and Google Cloud as the next player at 10%.

The latest Omdia IT Enterprise Insights survey of IT decision makers revealed that for serverless services there is already over 12% in production, but the scope for expansion is over 60% - see Figure 2. 

Omdia Chief Analyst Michael Azoff said: “Serverless is the unrecognized leading technology in cloud native computing. While the focus has mainly been on Kubernetes and containerization, serverless is proving attractive to enterprises which spend over $16bn per annum and is set to increase to $45bn by 2027.

“Running microservices in containers is the modern method of deployment into production. Container orchestration is a key requirement fulfilled mostly today by Kubernetes based products. Our analysis shows AWS at 24%, closely followed by Azure 20%, with Red Hat at 19% own the bulk of this market.”

CNC is a practice in software development that employs cloud computing to run and build scalable applications in modern settings such as private, hybrid, and public clouds. Applications are created and deployed on a foundation of agile and DevOps practices across development and operations, typically with microservices architecture and containerized in a Kubernetes orchestration environment.