Serverless computing saw an uptick in momentum last year with DigitalOcean's acquisition of Nimbella and the release of Knative 1.0, an open source serverless project that recently applied for incubation with the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF). But overall adoption of serverless architecture appears to have stalled.

The number of developers working on serverless architectures is slipping, according to a survey of more than 19,000 software developers conducted by SlashData and released by the CNCF. The report found the number of serverless developers — reportedly four million strong — declined from 27% of all developers in 2020 to 24% in 2021.

The trend reflects growing concern that serverless technologies lack the flexibility needed for widespread adoption and a reluctance among organizations to commit to specific technologies or providers, CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk told SDxCentral in response to questions.

Looking ahead, Aniszczyk doesn't expect serverless adoption to increase much in 2022 unless there's a "dramatic change" in the cloud-native landscape.

The downtrend may, however, have an upside, according to Aniszczyk. It may "drive increased demand for standards around interoperability and integration," one of the biggest challenges facing serverless today.

The CNCF's Serverless Workflow Project tackles this specific challenge by defining a vendor-neutral and declarative workflow language, Aniszczyk explained. The project's end goal is a specification-based language that lets developers model workflows just once and deploy them consistently across containers and clouds.

Serverless remains an appealing option among edge developers. SlashData found 48% of all edge developers are using serverless compared to only 33% of all backend developers.

Serverless computing allows edge developers to deploy services at scale "without getting mired in endless resource considerations and different hardware types on the edge," Aniszczyk explained.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft accounted for the lion's share of serverless developments. AWS Lambda, one of the first serverless products on the market, retained the top spot in this year's report, with 53% of backend developers reportedly using the platform. Google Cloud Functions held the N0. 2 spot with 41% of backend developers using it, while Azure Functions claimed third place with a 35% adoption.

However, Google Cloud Functions was also the only service to lose ground in 2021, falling 3 percentage points from the year prior. And while AWS maintains a significant lead over its cloud rivals, Google's Cloud Run service gained the most momentum in 2021, up 9 percentage points and claiming a 30% adoption rate.

Looking ahead, Aniszczyk expects Lambda to maintain its lead and for Google Cloud Run to pick up speed in 2022.

Among the backend developer community, SlashData found Amazon's Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) outpaced rival cloud providers in 2021, growing 15 percentage points and capturing 37% of backend developers.

Azure Kubernetes Service, meanwhile, grew 9 percentage points, capturing 30% of backend developers and narrowly outpacing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which grew 8 percentage points to claim 36% of the market.

However, among the broader development community, Amazon's Elastic Container Service remains the most popular with 33% of the total market. GKE and Amazon EKS followed close behind at 32% and 30%, respectively. Just 25% of all developers using orchestration tools use Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service, the report found.

Finally, the report found 17% of developers used Red Hat Open Shift, 12% used IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and 11% used VMware Tanzu.