Aparna Sinha, lead product manager, Google, discusses serverless computing at the 2018 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
When you look back at decades of computing history, the arc bends toward abstraction: the process of making it easier and easier for people to put their imagination into code by removing the complexity of actually getting software to run on hardware. Serverless computing is shaping up as the next big breakthrough in this ongoing process, and different visions of how it will actually work are starting to emerge among the cloud computing set.
We hosted five of those thinkers at the recent GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in Bellevue, Wash., devoting one of our five technical tracks to serverless computing. Serverless computing centers around the idea that software developers shouldn’t have to know anything about the hardware on which their code will run; there are still plenty of servers, but serverless services (say that ten times fast) allow developers to build and deploy apps without having to manage the computing resources required for those apps.