The server is dead, long live the server: Rise of Serverless Computing, Overview of Current State and Future Trends in Research and Industry

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of serverless computing, highlighting its evolution, architecture, benefits, challenges, and future research directions in cloud-native application deployment.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of serverless computing's current state, key characteristics, use cases, and identifies open research challenges based on expert discussions.

Findings

Serverless computing simplifies application deployment and operational management.

It offers pay-as-you-go billing with resource efficiency.

Several technical challenges and open problems remain in the field.

Abstract

Serverless computing -- an emerging cloud-native paradigm for the deployment of applications and services -- represents an evolution in cloud application development, programming models, abstractions, and platforms. It promises a real pay-as-you-go billing (with millisecond granularity) with no waste of resources, and lowers the bar for developers by asking them to delegate all their operational complexity and scalability to the cloud provider. Delivering on these promises comes at the expense of restricting functionality. In this article we provide an overview of serverless computing, its evolution, general architecture, key characteristics and uses cases that made it an attractive option for application development. Based on discussions with academics and industry experts during a series of organized serverless computing workshops (WoSC), we also identify the technical challenges and open problems.