UPDATED JUNE 2022

This research builds on the previous edition of this article, which was published in May 2021.

Serverless has transformed application development by eliminating the need

to provision and manage any underlying infrastructure. The current serverless
ecosystem has grown more mature, and it now has considerable overlap
with the world of container-based technologies. The wide range of available
options has led over half of organizations operating in each cloud to
adopt serverless.
For this report, we examined telemetry data from thousands of companies’
serverless applications, and we identified three key themes in how teams are
using serverless today. First, serverless compute has become an essential
part of the technology stacks of organizations that operate in each cloud.
Second, AWS Lambda remains extremely popular among AWS customers,
who are using it in new ways to support their unique business needs. Finally,
there are meaningful differences between the serverless offerings available
within AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and each gives users distinct options
for building serverless applications.
Continue reading to further explore these trends within the
serverless landscape.

State of Serverless Report 1 datadog.com

 Over half of organizations operating in
each cloud have adopted serverless
In 2020, we reported that half of Datadog’s customers using AWS had adopted Lambda to
run event-driven code with minimal operational overhead. As the popularity of FaaS
products like AWS Lambda continues to grow, we have also seen a significant increase in
adoption of other types of serverless technologies offered by Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.

This evolution highlights the growing range of options available to organizations who
want to go serverless, as well as a shift in how serverless technologies are leveraged. For
instance, in addition to using individual serverless functions to run event-driven code,
many organizations are also deploying containerized applications on serverless
platforms such as Azure Container Instances, Google Cloud Run, and Amazon ECS
Fargate. These services offer a range of benefits, which we will explore in more detail
later in this report.
Note: For the purpose of this fact, a serverless organization uses at least one of the following technologies:
AWS: AWS Lambda, AWS App Runner, ECS Fargate, EKS Fargate
Azure: Azure Functions, AKS running on Azure Container Instances
Google Cloud: Google Cloud Functions, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Run

State of Serverless Report 2 datadog.com

 Python and Node.js remain dominant
among Lambda users
Python and Node.js remain the most popular languages among Lambda users, which
continues a trend we identified in earlier reports. These languages were two of the
earliest to be supported by Lambda, and they have garnered a large and active following
in the serverless community. Typically, when organizations begin using Lambda, they
start with Python and Node.js because of their ease of use and wide breadth of supported
libraries, plugins, and learning materials. Then, once teams have grown more familiar
with Lambda and the benefits of serverless technologies, they are more likely to migrate
existing workloads that are not written in either Python or Node.js. This process has led
to increased adoption of languages like Go and Java in Lambda functions, which are both
used by more than 30 percent of Lambda organizations.

State of Serverless Report 3 datadog.com

 Over 60 percent of large organizations
have deployed Lambda functions in
at least three languages
Though Python and Node.js remain the most popular Lambda runtimes, 63 percent of
large organizations have deployed Lambda functions in three or more runtimes.

This trend illustrates that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building serverless

applications. For instance, teams may prefer to write serverless functions in a runtime
that their engineers are already familiar with, such as Java. But while a large number of
organizations have some Java functions, very few rely on them exclusively. This suggests
that teams are opting for different runtimes depending on the use case. For example,
Go’s built-in goroutines make it a good fit for workloads that can be optimized with
concurrency, such as data compression and video streaming.

State of Serverless Report 4 datadog.com

 API Gateway and SQS are the AWS
technologies that invoke Lambda functions
most frequently
Lambda is AWS’s most popular serverless offering, but Lambda functions rarely run in
isolation. Instead, they typically execute small chunks of code in response to events
emitted by a wide range of AWS services. The breadth of technologies invoking Lambda
functions illustrates the extent to which organizations are using Lambda in different ways
to support the unique needs of their organizations.

Note: This graph does not include Lambda function invocations from AWS AppSync or Step Functions.

For instance, API Gateway, a fully managed service that helps create and secure APIs, is
responsible for more than half of our customers’ Lambda function invocations. This fact
reflects its importance to many serverless environments, in which it receives API calls,
triggers Lambda functions, and then returns the response.
The second most common AWS service to invoke Lambda functions is Amazon Simple
Queue Service (SQS), which manages the sending and receiving of messages between the
components of your application. SQS is often used to decouple microservices and
implement asynchronous communication between them, which can help improve
performance in complex serverless applications. SQS is easy to configure and scale, and
it also includes a fault tolerance feature called Dead Letter Queues, which handle retry
logic for failed messages.

“Datadog’s 2022 State of Serverless report shows not only that Lambda remains
popular, but that organizations are using it alongside more and more AWS services
to build highly scalable applications. It will be exciting to see how developers
continue to leverage the entire AWS serverless ecosystem to support their unique
business needs.”
FILIP PYREK
AWS SERVERLESS HERO, PURPLE TECHNOLOGY

State of Serverless Report 5 datadog.com

 80 percent of Lambda invocations from API
Gateway are to single purpose functions
There are two common design patterns for serving APIs from Lambda functions:
monolithic functions (also known as “mono-Lambdas”) and single purpose functions.
Mono-Lambdas serve multiple HTTP endpoints and contain internal routing logic to
execute several different types of tasks, whereas single purpose functions respond to
only a single HTTP method and endpoint.
The vast majority of Lambda invocations by API Gateway are to single purpose functions,
which are used by more than 60 percent of our customers. This data reflects the many
key benefits of single purpose functions. For instance, single purpose functions are
isolated from one another, which allows them to be debugged and deployed
independently. Additionally, the single purpose approach enables teams to keep their
applications secure by assigning one IAM role per function, which is consistent with the
best practices defined in AWS’s Well-Architected Framework. Finally, single purpose
functions may have shorter cold start times than mono-Lambdas because of their
smaller package size.

“Single purpose Lambda functions are a crucial component of modern, serverless

microservice architectures. Not only can they be developed, debugged, and
deployed independently of one another, but they enable teams to fine-tune
resources and apply tightly-scoped IAM permissions per function. This helps to
optimize performance, save costs, and increase application security.”
JEREMY DALY
AWS SERVERLESS HERO, SERVERLESS INC.

State of Serverless Report 6 datadog.com

 One in five Lambda users is deploying
functions as container images
When Lambda functions were first introduced, the only deployment packages AWS
supported were .zip files containing all of your function’s code and dependencies. In
2020, however, AWS added support for packaging and deploying Lambda functions as
Docker container images. Since then, this method for deploying Lambda functions has
become increasingly popular, with one in five Lambda customers using it today. This fact
points to a growing and widespread interest in the combined benefits of serverless and
containerized technologies—as well as the increasingly blurry line between them.

Deploying Lambda functions as container images can have a number of benefits. For
example, .zip files have a size limit of 250 MB, whereas container images can be up to 10
GB. This significantly larger size limit allows organizations to leverage dependency-heavy
libraries such as NumPy and PyTorch, which support data analytics and machine learning
tasks. Additionally, packaging Lambda functions as container images makes it easier for
organizations with existing Docker-based deployments and CI/CD pipelines to integrate
serverless solutions. This ability to seamlessly incorporate serverless functions into
existing workflows can save teams a significant amount of time and boost their productivity.

State of Serverless Report 7 datadog.com

 More than 20 percent of Lambda
customers are also using ECS Fargate
AWS customers have benefited greatly from their adoption of Lambda functions, which
remain extremely popular. This success has led Lambda users to seek new ways to
expand their serverless footprint. Most notably, we found that more than 20 percent of
Lambda customers are also using ECS Fargate to launch containers without managing
and provisioning EC2 instances.

This fact indicates that organizations are increasingly committed to serverless—and

points to a deep-seated belief in the ability of serverless technology to optimize their
workloads and operations. Fargate offers an appealing way to act on this commitment
because it enables teams that are running applications with either ECS or EKS to easily
migrate their codebase without heavily refactoring it. Fargate also gives teams granular
control over resource allocation, making it well-suited for resource intensive workloads
such as batch processing and machine learning jobs.

“Datadog’s 2022 The State of Serverless report continues to highlight the maturity
of the ecosystem, and the breadth of business challenges that developers are able
to address with serverless architectures. We’re excited to see organizations benefit
from the agility, elasticity, and cost efficiency of adopting serverless technologies
like AWS Lambda and Fargate, and the new paths available to them.”
AJAY NAIR
DIRECTOR, EXPERIENCE, AWS LAMBDA

State of Serverless Report 8 datadog.com

 Google Cloud Run is the fastest growing method for
deploying serverless applications in Google Cloud
Nearly 40 percent of Datadog customers operating in Google Cloud have adopted Google Cloud
Functions, making it the most popular serverless offering in that cloud. However, this level of
adoption is only about 3 percent above that of Google Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s serverless
container product. This finding suggests that when it comes to serverless, an increasing number of
Google Cloud users are seizing the opportunity to launch containerized applications that don’t
require infrastructure management.

There are several reasons why an organization may adopt Cloud Run. Whereas traditional FaaS
products like Cloud Functions support only a handful of languages and execute one request at a time,
Cloud Run allows users to write code in any language and can be configured to run multiple
concurrent requests (in fact, all Datadog customers using Cloud Run regularly run multiple concurrent
requests). This concurrency support can improve performance by reducing latency, and is especially
useful for RESTful APIs with large I/O-bound workloads. Additionally, organizations can upload
existing container images to Google Cloud’s Artifact Registry and deploy them as microservices on
Cloud Run, which simplifies the migration process. In contrast, migrating legacy code to serverless
functions requires you to break down your existing application into separate services and build
additional handlers that respond to specific events, which is significantly more complex.

“At Google Cloud, we’re seeing serverless rapidly evolve beyond the original FaaS model toward
more portable container-based applications. Cloud Run provides a fully managed, pre-
provisioned platform that enables accelerated productivity and allows customers to scale
rapidly without creating clusters. What’s more, any containerized applications created with
Cloud Run are generally portable to Kubernetes-based platforms and reduce lock-in. Datadog’s
latest research validates the new levels of enterprise maturity serverless delivers with a growing
number of features that help increase software supply chain integrity, such as binary
authorization container attestations, integration with managed secrets, and support for
workload identity best practices.”
SAGAR RANDIVE
PRODUCT MANAGER, GOOGLE CLOUD SERVERLESS

State of Serverless Report 9 datadog.com

 Azure Functions is Azure’s most popular
serverless offering, but adoption of Azure
Container Instances is growing fast
Azure’s FaaS product, Azure Functions, is its most popular serverless offering, and it is
used by more than 40 percent of Azure customers. However, Azure Container Instances
(ACI), which enables organizations to run fully managed serverless containers, has seen a
significant increase in adoption, and it is used by nearly 30 percent of Azure customers
today. This fact echoes similar trends that we identified within Google Cloud and AWS—
namely, that organizations are moving beyond the traditional FaaS paradigm and are
using serverless to launch containerized workloads. We also expect to see a further
increase in the adoption of other Azure serverless container technologies such as Azure
Container Apps, which enables teams to build and deploy entire containerized
applications in managed serverless environments.

One of the key features of ACI is that it enables you to get containers up and running in
seconds without worrying about infrastructure management. And, if you’re already using
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can integrate it with ACI to automatically provision
enough capacity for typical workloads—and then dynamically scale pods in a cluster
during traffic spikes.

State of Serverless Report 10 datadog.com

 Methodology

POPULATION For this report, we compiled usage data from thousands of companies in Datadog’s
customer base. But while Datadog customers cover the spectrum of company size and
industry, they do share some common traits. First, they tend to be serious about software
infrastructure and application performance. They also skew toward adoption of cloud
platforms and services more than the general population. All the results in this article are
biased by the fact that the data comes from our customer base, a large but imperfect
sample of the entire global market.

FACT #1 In order to determine what percentage of organizations have adopted serverless in each
cloud, we had to first define “serverless compute,” and then define what makes an
organization a customer of a particular cloud. Our definition of serverless compute
includes the following technologies:
AWS: AWS Lambda, AWS App Runner, ECS Fargate, EKS Fargate
Azure: Azure Functions, AKS running on Azure Container Instances
Google Cloud: Google Cloud Functions, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Run
We have not included Azure Container Apps and GKE Autopilot, which were released too
recently to impact our report.
We consider an organization to be a customer of a given cloud if they run at least five
hosts per month in that particular cloud. They are also considered a customer of a cloud if
they run at least five functions or one serverless product per month in that cloud. Some
organizations meet both sets of criteria, whereas others meet only one. For the purposes
of this fact, organizations that met the latter set of criteria as of December 2021 are
considered to have adopted serverless compute.

FACT #3 When analyzing language usage in Lambda functions among large organizations, we
defined large organizations as those that run at least 100 distinct functions per month.
This figure represents approximately 33 percent of all organizations we considered. Our
definition of a “runtime language” includes an aggregate of all versions of that language.
The graph does not include any custom Lambda runtimes.

FACT #4 In order to determine which technologies invoke Lambda functions most often, we
analyzed APM trace data across all instrumented Lambda functions over a two week
period, which is the default retention period for traces. We are currently unable to identify
invocations from some technologies, such as AWS AppSync and Step Functions.

FACT #5 We used the same methodology from fact 4 in order to determine what percentages of
invocations from API Gateway are to single purpose and monolithic Lambda functions.
We defined mono-Lambdas as those that are configured with a generic proxy resource,
which enables the function to be called with any HTTP method, headers, query string
parameters, and payload. We defined single purpose functions as those that trigger in
response to a single route of a REST API. For more information, see the
API Gateway documentation.

FACT #6 We consider an organization to be actively using Lambda if they monitored at least 20

more functions with Datadog in February 2022 than they did in February 2021.

FACT #7 For this fact, we defined an ECS organization as one that was monitoring at least one ECS
Fargate host with Datadog in a given month from January 2018 to December 2021.

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State of
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