The State of FaaS: An analysis of public Functions-as-a-Service providers

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of ten public FaaS platforms, analyzing their features, history, and pricing to assess the current landscape of serverless computing beyond the major providers.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed comparison of ten publicly available FaaS providers, expanding beyond well-known platforms to give a broader industry perspective.

Findings

Most providers offer unique features and pricing models.

FaaS landscape is diverse with varying maturity levels.

Major providers dominate but smaller platforms are emerging.

Abstract

Serverless computing is a growing and maturing field that is the focus of much research, industry interest and adoption. Previous works exploring Functions-as-a-Service providers have focused primarily on the most well known providers AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions without exploring other providers in similar detail. In this work, we conduct the first detailed review of ten currently publicly available FaaS platforms exploring everything from their history, to their features and pricing to where they sit within the overall public FaaS landscape, before making a number of observations as to the state of the FaaS.