The Serverless Computing Survey: A Technical Primer for Design Architecture

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of serverless computing architectures, analyzing key research domains across four stack layers and discussing challenges and future directions in the field.

Contribution

It offers a structured overview of serverless computing architecture layers, highlighting research challenges and proposing future research directions.

Findings

Identifies four key architectural layers in serverless computing.

Highlights security implications and limitations at each layer.

Suggests potential challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

The development of cloud infrastructures inspires the emergence of cloud-native computing. As the most promising architecture for deploying microservices, serverless computing has recently attracted more and more attention in both industry and academia. Due to its inherent scalability and flexibility, serverless computing becomes attractive and more pervasive for ever-growing Internet services. Despite the momentum in the cloud-native community, the existing challenges and compromises still wait for more advanced research and solutions to further explore the potentials of the serverless computing model. As a contribution to this knowledge, this article surveys and elaborates the research domains in the serverless context by decoupling the architecture into four stack layers: Virtualization, Encapsule, System Orchestration, and System Coordination. Inspired by the security model, we highlight the key implications and limitations of these works in each layer, and make suggestions for potential challenges to the field of future serverless computing.