A new report from observability platform provider Datadog found enterprises increasingly looking toward serverless concepts in deploying and managing their containerized applications. This was highlighted by strong growth in the use of managed container platforms being offered by the market’s leading hyperscalers.

Datadog noted that Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Lambda remains the benchmark for serverless usage, which is not surprising as Lambda was the genesis of the current serverless movement. Jumping off of Lambda, the report found that more than 20% of Lambda aficionados were using AWS’ Elastic Container Service (ECS) Fargate platform to “launch containers without managing and provisioning EC2 instances.”

Datadog proffered that Fargate is an easy way for teams to migrate application codebases running in ECS or Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to serverless. It also noted that Fargate provides a granular level of control over resource allocation that is good for resource intensive workloads like batch processing and machine learning jobs.

AWS’ ECS is its fully managed and opinionated container hosting platform that is tightly integrated into the AWS ecosystem. EKS is AWS’ Kubernetes-focused container platform that allows for more flexibility by tapping into the broader Kubernetes ecosystem. Fargate is a runtime layer for EC2 that allows customers to run containers without managing servers and clusters.

Microsoft witnessed a similar migration from its core Azure Functions functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform to its newer Azure Container Instances (ACI) product.

Azure Functions remains the cloud giant’s serverless workhorse, being used by more than 40% of Azure customers. However, ACI is now being used by nearly 30% of Azure customers, hinting customers are increasingly interested in running fully managed serverless containers.

Datadog noted that ACI allows users to quickly instantiate containers without having to deal with infrastructure management, which is a serverless hallmark. ACI also allows users to quickly integrate with the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to automatically provision capacity for typical workloads.

That push toward serverless containers could also spike interest in Microsoft’s Azure Container Apps that supports building and deploying containerized applications in managed serverless environments.

Further solidifying this notion, Datadog found that while nearly 40% of its customers were using Google’s Cloud Functions service, nearly as many were using Google’s Cloud Run serverless container product.

“This finding suggests that when it comes to serverless, an increasing number of Google Cloud users are seizing the opportunity to launch containerized applications that don't require infrastructure management,” Datadog noted.

The firm went on to explain that traditional FaaS products like Cloud Functions support only a small number of programming languages and can only execute one request at a time. Newer platforms, like Cloud Run, are open to more programming languages, can run multiple requests at once, and allow microservices to be constructed using existing container images.

“In contrast, migrating legacy code to serverless functions requires you to break down your existing application into separate services and build additional handlers that respond to specific events, which is significantly more complex,” Datadog said.

Despite the Datadog accolades, overall serverless adoption remains murky.

Cisco’s most recent “2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report” found that 40% of enterprises surveyed that were using cloud-native technologies were using serverless. This was slightly higher than those that said they were using Kubernetes.

However, a survey earlier this year from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found a slowdown last year in the adoption of serverless architectures. That survey of more than 19,000 software developers found the number of developers working on serverless architectures slipping from 27% of all developers in 2020 to 24% in 2021.