If you are an IT decision maker, multi-cloud is surely on your mind. Gartner predicts that multi-cloud will become the common strategy for 70% of enterprises by 2019, up from less than 10% today. Multi-cloud connectivity offers businesses the flexibility to take the best from each cloud offer. It can be multiple public clouds, multiple virtual or on-premise private clouds, multiple managed or unmanaged clouds, or a mix of them all. The key is that you choose what gets you the most benefits and you have plenty of choice: By 2020, data centers will only account for 50% of the market, while public cloud will dominate a third of the market as private cloud captures 20%. Gartner goes as far as saying “The Data Center is Dead” as businesses take advantage of the cloud and Saas offerings.

At the same time that businesses are moving to multi-cloud, Serverless is happening!

What is Serverless?

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity. The server management and capacity planning decisions are hidden from the developer or operator. Serverless code can be used in conjunction with code deployed in traditional styles or they can be written to be purely serverless and use no provisioned servers at all. Serverless architectures enable developers to run their functions in the cloud and focus on user needs instead of spending time managing infrastructure and servers.

“Cloud provider” used to mean whoever hosts your servers. In a serverless paradigm, it means whoever runs your functions.

Serverless Is…

• Cost Effective: Serverless is more cost-effective than renting or purchasing a fixed quantity of servers, and also easily scales. It is pay-as-you-go computing so there is no under-utilization or idle time. Also, there are clear cost benefits related to the lack of operating systems costs such as licenses, installation, maintenance.
• Scalable: With a serverless architecture developers and operators spend no time setting up and tuning auto-scaling policies or systems. The cloud provider is responsible for seamlessly scaling capacity to demand.
• Agile: Small teams of developers can run code themselves without depending on teams of infrastructure and support engineers.
• Productive: With FaaS (Function as a Service), the code exposed to the outside world are simple functions, which means that the developer does not have to worry about multi-threading or directly handling HTTP requests in their code. It simplifies the tasks of back-end software development.

Why Extreme Went Serverless?

Extreme wants to make multi-cloud environment easy for you. Lets you drive your business while others do the hard work of building highly available, scalable, end to end applications. And how can we do this? We acquired StackStorm just last year. It’s a powerful open-source automation platform that wires together all of your apps, services and workflows. It’s extendable, flexible. StackStorm is also the foundation for Extreme Workflow Composer, network automation for enterprises. Read more about what it means for us to go serverless in our latest blog post: “Extreme Goes Serverless”.

Orquesta – Our New Workflow Engine

Our StackStorm engineers have been busy writing a new workflow engine: Orquesta. This is a new StackStorm-native workflow engine. They’ve taken what they learned over the years and improved upon it. The idea is to provide a better, simpler experience for creating, running and debugging complex workflows. Orquesta runs as a StackStorm sub-component, and uses the same configurations, database and log locations as the rest of the StackStorm services. This makes deployment and troubleshooting simpler. If you want to learn more, come to ServerlessConf in San Francisco, CA July 29 through August 1. Our own Winson Chan and Dmitri Zimine, will show a demo of how StackStorm can be used for serverless and give a preview of our new Orquesta workflow engine.

See also StackStorm at ServerlessConf in San Francisco.

This blog was originally authored by Bettina Baumgart, Senior Manager of Product Marketing.