Quantitative Analysis of Cloud Function Evolution in the AWS Serverless Application Repository

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed analysis of how AWS Lambda functions and serverless applications have evolved over a year, offering insights into their offering models, implementation statistics, and change patterns.

Contribution

It is the first study to analyze the evolution of cloud functions and serverless applications in the AWS ecosystem over time.

Findings

Insights into offering models and descriptions of AWS Lambda functions

Statistics on implementation and usage patterns

Identification of change patterns over one year

Abstract

The serverless computing ecosystem is growing due to interest by software engineers. Beside Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) systems, developer-oriented tools such as deployment and debugging frameworks as well as cloud function repositories enable the rapid creation of wholly or partially serverless applications. This study presents first insights into how cloud functions (Lambda functions) and composite serverless applications offered through the AWS Serverless Application Repository have evolved over the course of one year. Specifically, it outlines information on cloud function and function-based application offering models and descriptions, high-level implementation statistics, and evolution including change patterns over time. Several results are presented in live paper style, offering hyperlinks to continuously updated figures to follow the evolution after publication date.