A pay-as-you-go pricing model and increased velocity are two well-known effects that serverless technologies have on application delivery. Just as important, but often overlooked, is how serverless affects developer workflows and team dynamics. Rather than focusing entirely on business logic and code, developers take on more responsibility for configuring cloud resources.

“[Serverless] redistributes the responsibility of operations work and in the grand scheme it actually enforces the DevOps model,” Nate Taggart, CEO of Stackery, said. “Serverless is fundamentally DevOps. It’s developers having to iterate over operations work in the same cycle as their development work.”

Serverless adoption doesn’t start with the CTO, Taggart said. Instead, organizations typically adopt serverless because their engineers have started to use AWS Lambda on their own in an effort to ship features faster. The absence of governance can create resiliency and scaling problems for organizations, as individual developers bring their own workflows into a team dynamic. Operations teams quickly lose visibility and control into the application as a whole, and rollbacks and troubleshooting become a concern.