推荐序1

Fourteen years ago, in 2005, it was unfathomable to imagine building an internet application without spending millions of dollars in upfront capital and tens of thousands of working hours building one's own data center and developing the requisite software stack — constraining this domain to a small set of companies and stymying product innovation.

The launch of Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006 enabled customers to skip the capital intensive process of building data centers and purchasing hardware. This model, known as Infrastructure as a Service（IaaS）, allowed customers to rent compute capacity in a pay as you go model — opening up internet application development to a broader audience. However, applications still required building and operating associated backend systems on top of hardware — requiring large engineering teams whose sole focus is on backend infrastructure, not product innovation. Cloud computing remained a product for operators, not for product innovators or individual developers.

Today, we are at a turning point in cloud computing. Serverless computing — the idea that customers only write the required business logic while the cloud provides everything else —represents a quantum leap in cloud computing. Finally, it's possible for hardware, infrastructure, application platforms, and operations to be abstracted away, freeing developers to focus solely on product innovation. Industry trendsetters such as Netflix have already shifted parts of their core business logic over to serverless — improving product innovation, reducing cost, and enhancing reliability. Application platforms built on serverless are emerging, such as WeChat miniprograms, allowing individual developers to productize and scale them for millions of users quickly.

This book serves as an excellent introduction to readers interested in serverless architectures —striking a balance between theory and application — while also introducing the history and background.

The serverless revolution will bring cloud computing to the masses. I eagerly await the products this revolution will unlock！

Yunong Xiao

腾讯云中间件总经理、首席架构师

2019年10月18日

推荐序1大意如下：

14年前，也就是2005年，那时我们无法想象在不花费数百万美元和数万小时构建自己的数据中心的情况下，能够开发一款软件或者构建一个网络应用，当时，这也是阻碍一些小型团队持续创新与发展的重要原因。

2006年，Amazon Web Services推出弹性计算云服务，该项服务使客户可以跳过建设数据中心和购买硬件的资本密集型流程，被称为Infrastructure as a Service，即IaaS。IaaS允许客户以“即用即付”的模式租用计算能力，从而可以面向更广泛的客户开放应用开发所必需的基础设施。然而，应用程序仍然需要在硬件上构建，同时需要运行相关的后端系统，这同样需要大型工程团队全身心投入和关注后端基础设施，而不是只关注产品创新等。云计算仍然是云厂商的产品，而不是个人开发者的产品。

今天，我们正处于云计算发展的转折点。Serverless—一个客户仅编写所需的业务逻辑代码而云厂商提供其他所有功能的架构，代表了云计算的一种巨大进步与飞跃。这个架构有可能抽象出硬件、基础架构、应用程序平台和操作等，这个架构可以使开发人员将精力完全放在产品创新上。像Netflix这样的行业引领者已经将其部分核心业务逻辑实现转移到了Serverless架构上，从而促进了产品创新，降低了成本并增强了可靠性。建立在Serverless架构上的应用平台正在兴起，例如微信小程序，它使个人开发者可以快速为数百万用户提供稳定的产品和服务。

该书围绕Serverless架构，不仅有历史和背景的相关描述，还有理论基础的总结和应用实践的分享，对于对Serverless架构感兴趣的读者来说，是一本不错的书籍。

Serverless革命将把云计算带给大众。我热切期待这场革命将解锁的产品！