Azure Matching AWS When It Comes To Serverless Storytelling

I consume a huge amount of blog and Twitter feeds each week. I evaluate the stories published by major tech blogs, cloud providers, and individual API providers. In my work there is a significant amount of duplicity in stories, mostly because of press release regurgitation, but one area I watch closely is the volume of stories coming out of major cloud computing providers around specific topics that are relevant to APIs. One of these topics I’m watching closely is the new area of serverless, and what type of stories each providers are putting out there.

Amazon has long held the front runner position because AWS Lambda was the first major cloud provider to do serverless, coining the term, and dominating the conversation with their brand of API evangelism. However, in the last couple months I have to say that Microsoft is matching AWS when it comes to the storytelling coming out of Azure in the area of serverless and function as a service (FaaS). Amazon definitely has an organic lead in the conversation, but when it comes to the shear volume, and regular drumbeat of serverless stories Microsoft is keeping pace. After watching several months of sustained storytelling, it looks like they could even pass up Amazon in the near future.

When you are down in the weeds you tend to not see how narratives spread across the space, and the power of this type of storytelling, but from my vantage point, it is how all the stories we tell at the ground level get seeded, and become reality. It isn’t something you can do overnight, and very few organizations have the resources, and staying power to make this type of storytelling a sustainable thing. I know that many startups and enterprise groups simply see this as content creation and syndication, but that is the quickest way to make your operations unsustainable. Nobody enjoys operating a content farm, and if nobody cares about the content when it is being made, then nobody will care about the content when it is syndicated and consumed–this is why I tell stories, and you should to.

Stories are how all of this works. It is stories that developers tell within their circles that influence what tools they will adopt. It is stories at the VC level that determine which industries, trends, and startups they’ll invest in. Think about the now infamous Jeff Bezos mandate, which has been elevated to mythical status, and contributed to much of the cloud adoption we have seen to date. It is this kind of storytelling that will determine each winner of the current and future battles between cloud giants. Whether it is serverless, devops, microservices, machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet of things, and any other scifi, API-driven topic we can come up with in the coming years. I have to admit, it is interesting to see Microsoft do so well in the area of storytelling after many years of sucking at it.