Nick Rockwell, chief technology officer of The New York Times Co., gave a talk at a tech conference in early October, arguing for a major shift in the way software is developed and deployed. He maintained that information technology leaders were putting too much effort into a relatively new architecture in which applications are broken into smaller, standardized and reusable pieces, often compared to the shipping containers that revolutionized freight. Instead, he endorsed an even more radical approach that does away with the need for developers to manage computer servers and operating systems.
“I argued that serverless architectures are a huge innovation and will take over and everyone is just scared and why is everyone messing around with containers, it’s stupid,” he wrote in a blog post shortly after the O’Reilly Media Velocity Conference in New York. “It was not very well received.”