Serverless compute sounds like heaven, but without the right mindset it can be hell. Between the constraints placed on serverless environments by cloud providers, the potential for proliferation of applications and variations of versions, and the general mind shift required to build for serverless, the shift to cloud functions isn't something that just happens overnight.

"The interesting thing about serverless platforms is they are a constrained execution environment, which is a good thing. It means that the cloud vendor can provide capabilities for customers at a fraction of the cost of what they were if they were fully customizable... The problem is, as these platforms are still maturing, they are necessarily constrained in what kind of execution they will allow. For instance, most of them don't let you run for more than five or ten minutes... The challenge is, what if you can't run in that uniform environment? This is where containers come into play," said  Donna Malayeri, Product Manager at Pulumi.

"OK, we're going to write some functions, but how do we deal with our data? We have 14 petabytes of data and we can't just whimsically move it somewhere. So, introducing more environment control from that perspective is kind of a big deal to me. I keep running into these scenarios, and a lot of the times it's still a big question mark. What are we going to do? We started to build on this new serverless architecture, but we still have huge data problems," said Adron Hall, of Thrashing Code.