The Future of Serverless Architectures in Data Engineering

With every increase in the complexity and volume of data engineering workloads, organizations face highly important architectural choices to make in terms of compute execution environments. The serverless computing platforms and containerized orchestration systems presented by two dominant paradigms provide different favourable measurements in terms of performance, cost, scalability, and operating overheads. Although the concept of a serverless platform features automatic scaling, simplified operations, and a pay-as-you-use business model, the containerized offers predictable performance, control of resources in fine-grained way and it is useful with long-running workloads. This paper compares empirically and data-driven two architectures (serverless and containerized) in terms of data engineering pipelines, namely, ETL workflows, event-driven processing, streaming analytics, and batch jobs. Based on the public cloud benchmark datasets, academic measurement literature, Open Telemetry traces, and published pricing models, the research conducts measurement of latency, throughput, economic efficiency, scalability under burst workload, and the reliability of this operation. The results reveal that serverless systems perform better in bursty and event-driven workloads that have unpredictable demand, but containerized systems have better performance in sustained and high-throughput pipes and resource-intensive workloads. The conclusion of the paper ended with practical recommendations to offer the builders on the best model of execution without violating workload characteristics.