While acknowledging that enterprise adoption of serverless computing is still in the low single digits, startup Stackery Inc. is hoping take advantage of the concept’s growing momentum by introducing an operations console today that’s specifically tuned to serverless environments.

Stackery describes the Serverless Operations Console as a set of software tools that enable developers to control and monitor their serverless applications, saying this capability addresses one of the biggest objections so far to serverless computing. Stackery provides automation, predictable performance and operational control for companies moving into production.

Serverless computing is exactly what it sounds like – computing without a server. Rather than loading applications from a central location, functions are encapsulated as microservices deployed in containers. The model isn’t a direct replacement for traditional computing, but is better-suited to applications that must scale up or down quickly, have unpredictable workloads or need short-term, transactional responses, such as a credit card approval.

In addition to performance benefits, a serverless architecture can be metered at a much finer level, enabling charges to be incurred only when code is executing. This model is driving much of the current interest,  because savings can be significant. Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda is the best-known example of a serverless cloud platform, but Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC offer similar options. Research and Markets estimates the market, which is also known as “function as a service” at just under $2 billion in 2016, growing to $7.7 billion in 2021.

Pent-up demand

“Companies on the bleeding edge are very motivated because of the cost advantages, and they’re building the tools and workflows internally,” said Nate Taggart (pictured), Stackery’s co-founder and chief executive. “On the sidelines are the rest of the Fortune 1000, who are waiting for the ecosystem to mature so the point that they can put serverless applications into production. There’s a lot of pent-up demand right now.”

Stackery’s console is used to design, deploy and monitor serverless networks. “We help you connect events to  resources such as a database. We help you deploy by packaging up the code and instantiating the infrastructure in your own cloud account. Then we monitor for error handling, metrics, logging and security policies, Taggart said.

Co-founders Taggart and Chase Douglas both previously worked at New Relic Inc., where “we built giant data ingestion pipelines taking in millions of data points a second. Traffic was unpredictable, so it was hard to plan infrastructure,” Taggart said. When the serverless concept first emerged about two years ago, “we saw that it would have solved a lot of our problems, but it was difficult to test and integrate applications.” They started building a management console on the side, got inquiries from developers and earlier this year raised $1.75 million in venture funding.

Abstraction layer

The product is an abstraction layer that sits on top of serverless platforms such as Lambda, AWS’s Kinesis Streams and its API Gateway. Developers can design serverless networks, automate deployment of both infrastructure and applications, integrate with version control software, manage environment configuration and monitor application and infrastructure health.

The interest level is so high that “it’s been fairly easy to find customers,” Taggart said. “The challenge has been with companies transitioning from the evaluation to implementation. Enterprises are trying to figure out where serverless makes sense.”

Stackery is priced at $149 per user per month for a single commercial account. There’s also a free version for individual developers. The free and commercial versions are functionally identical, but the enterprise edition has features needed by teams of developers.

Image: Stackery