A Review of Serverless Use Cases and their Characteristics

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey and characterization of 89 serverless computing use cases, analyzing their features to aid platform tuning, design, and understanding of the paradigm.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed characterization framework for serverless use cases, collected from diverse sources, to support research and development in the field.

Findings

Identified 89 diverse serverless use cases.

Analyzed use cases using 24 characteristics.

Provided insights to guide platform design and optimization.

Abstract

The serverless computing paradigm promises many desirable properties for cloud applications - low-cost, fine-grained deployment, and management-free operation. Consequently, the paradigm has underwent rapid growth: there currently exist tens of serverless platforms and all global cloud providers host serverless operations. To help tune existing platforms, guide the design of new serverless approaches, and overall contribute to understanding this paradigm, in this work we present a long-term, comprehensive effort to identify, collect, and characterize 89 serverless use cases. We survey use cases, sourced from white and grey literature, and from consultations with experts in areas such as scientific computing. We study each use case using 24 characteristics, including general aspects, but also workload, application, and requirements. When the use cases employ workflows, we further analyze their characteristics. Overall, we hope our study will be useful for both academia and industry, and encourage the community to further share and communicate their use cases. This article appears also as a SPEC Technical Report: https://research.spec.org/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/rg_cloud/endorsed_publications/SPEC_RG_2020_Serverless_Usecases.pdf The article may be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.