The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) last year established a serverless working group to help define serverless technologies and how they fit into a cloud native architecture. One of the first, most common issues the group addressed was the lack of an industry-wide definition for events and the associated metadata.

“Everyone defines an event a little bit differently and they don't really take into account the context of the event,” said Ken Owens, vice president of digital architecture at MasterCard and a member of the CNCF’s serverless working group. “Being able to fire off something and forget about it and hope that it works was a common pattern we used to have. We now have more business logic that's needed around those events to understand more about the context and the success or the failure of those events.”