Serverless Computing Marks Decade of Business Transformation

The shipping container revolutionised global trade in the 1950s by standardising cargo transport. Today, a digital equivalent is transforming enterprise technology: serverless computing, which packages code into standardised units that run without dedicated infrastructure.

Despite the name, serverless computing doesn’t eliminate servers – it abstracts them. In serverless architecture, cloud providers like AWS (Lambda), Microsoft Azure (Functions) and Google Cloud (Cloud Functions) manage the provisioning and scaling of infrastructure, ensuring developers can deploy code in discrete functions triggered by events – all without managing a single server or virtual machine.

The growth trajectory of serverless is steep. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global serverless computing market is projected to grow from US$21.9bn in 2024 to US$44.7bn by 2029

With AWS’ offering, Lambda, reaching its 10th year in the market in 2024, the technology has evolved from experimental concept to an enterprise cornerstone that powers mission-critical systems across industries.

AWS Lambda: A decade of enterprise adoption

Serverless computing emerged from observations that many organisations maintained idle computing capacity just to handle intermittent tasks. “We saw that customers had entire EC2 fleets sitting idle, waiting to run simple functions like writing to a database or processing a file. It was inefficient, and we knew we could do better,” noted Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in his 10th anniversary commentary on Lambda.

This inefficiency prompted AWS to develop Lambda. The service eliminated the need for customers to provision servers, manage scaling, or handle patching – allowing developers to focus exclusively on code.

The original vision for Lambda came from watching how customers struggled with traditional infrastructure. AWS noticed organisations dedicating substantial resources to managing computing environments rather than developing differentiated features. The project began with the characteristic Amazon approach: writing a press release for a product that didn’t yet exist.

“As an Amazonian, regardless of role or seniority, there is an expectation that when you have a good idea, you’ll put pen to paper and craft a compelling narrative,” Werner explained.

How AWS helped Hapag-Lloyd drive better business decisions

German shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd demonstrates how serverless architectures deliver real business outcomes. The company operates 292 container ships and serves more than 600 ports across all continents through 113 liner services. With 13,700 employees across 399 offices in 139 countries, Hapag-Lloyd manages a container capacity of 3.4 million TEU, including one of the largest fleets of refrigerated containers in the industry.

The company’s Web & Mobile department, which serves hundreds of thousands of customers with online applications for container booking and tracking, migrated to AWS in 2020 and embraced a serverless architecture.

“Using AWS services and capabilities in our department, it was possible to scale up solutions that are safe and customer-oriented,” says Borys Wirkus, IT Director at Hapag-Lloyd in Gdansk. “We, in Web & Mobile, are AWS frontrunners in the company, because this is what our customers are expecting: fast, reliable and suitable solutions.”

The migration created challenges, however. The 70-person Web & Mobile team found itself managing over 1,000 AWS Lambda functions across multiple accounts. To maintain visibility across this distributed architecture, Hapag-Lloyd built a centralised logging solution using Amazon OpenSearch Service.

“We created centralised logging so that software engineers and business stakeholders could have one place to search for technical and business metrics,” says Grzegorz Kaczor, cloud architect in Web & Mobile at Hapag-Lloyd.

This monitoring system collects data from various components including Lambda functions and Amazon API Gateway, and processes logs from asynchronous services like Amazon Simple Notification Service and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka.

“The system automatically produces technical log events and is complemented by a style guide for integrating product-specific events, tailored to their unique characteristics,” says Marcin Szałomski, Software Architect in Web & Mobile at Hapag-Lloyd. “Using this rich log data, we have engineered a solution that not only supports our day-to-day operations but also automates certain tasks.”

The benefits extend beyond technical operations into business decision-making. For example, the team used OpenSearch Service dashboards to evaluate feature usage in their Quick Quotes product, which generates shipping container quotes in 30 seconds. Analysis revealed certain functionalities that customers rarely used, allowing product managers to exclude these from upgrades – saving development time and reducing technical complexity.

“We use the Amazon OpenSearch Service dashboard to make data-driven decisions, which is very important to us,” says Felipe Barrera, Product Owner of Quotation Tools in Web & Mobile at Hapag-Lloyd.

This level of visibility into application performance creates strategic advantages. “We have much better flexibility as a team because – using Amazon OpenSearch Service and the centralised logging – we have more information and we can measure success,” says Dawid Kuziemski, Product Manager of Web & Mobile at Hapag-Lloyd. “We can learn faster and iterate faster on our software because we can measure if we are improving.”

Continued evolution of serverless computing

While AWS maintains a significant market position with Lambda, the serverless sector has expanded with Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions and IBM Cloud Functions all offering comparable services. These platforms compete on factors including execution time limits, language support and integration capabilities.

Microsoft positions Azure Functions as part of its broader Platform-as-a-Service strategy, emphasising integration with Office 365 and Dynamics. Google Cloud Functions highlights its connection to Firebase, while IBM focuses on enterprise integration patterns. Open-source alternatives like Knative provide building blocks for serverless applications that run on Kubernetes.

Despite these considerations, serverless adoption continues accelerating across sectors. Financial services firms process transactions and detect fraud through serverless functions. Media companies transform content through event-driven workflows, while manufacturers connect IoT devices through lightweight architectures.

The future of serverless computing trends toward higher abstraction as providers develop integrated services that combine functions with databases and API gateways.

“The digitalisation of the container industry is an ongoing journey – we are dedicated to making strategic, purposeful decisions so that we can satisfy our customers’ needs,” says Borys from Hapag-Lloyd. “With the rapid expansion in our sector, having secure and responsive solutions that address customer issues promptly is essential.”

To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.

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