research-article

Free access

The rise of serverless computing

Authors:

Paul Castro,

Vatche Ishakian,

Vinod Muthusamy,

Aleksander SlominskiAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 62, Issue 12

Pages 44 - 54

https://doi.org/10.1145/3368454

Published: 21 November 2019 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

The server is dead, long live the server.

References

[1]

Agha, G. An overview of actor languages. In Proceedings of the 1986 SIGPLAN Workshop on Object-Oriented Programming, 58--67. ACM, New York, NY.

Google Scholar

[2]

Armbrust, M. et al. A view of cloud computing. Commun. ACM 53, 4 (2010), 50--58; https://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/4/81493-a-view-of-cloud-computing/fulltext

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

AWS re:invent 2014---(mbl202) new launch: Getting started with AWS lambda; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFj27laTWQA.

Google Scholar

[4]

Bainomugisha, E., Carreton, A.L., . Cutsem, V., Mostinckx, S. and Meuter, W.D. A survey on reactive programming. ACM Comput. Surv. 45, 4 (Aug. 2013), 52:1--52:34.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Baldini, I., Castro, P., Cheng, P., Fink, S., Ishakian, V., Mitchell, N., Muthusamy, V., Rabbah, R., Suter, P. Cloud-native, event-based programming for mobile applications. In Proceedings of the Intern. Conf. on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, 2016, 287--288. ACM, New York, NY.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Baldini, I. et al. Serverless computing: Current trends and open problems. Research Advances in Cloud Computing, Springer, 2017, 1--20.

Google Scholar

[7]

Baldini, I., Cheng, P., Fink, S.J., Mitchell, N., Muthusamy, V., Rabbah, R., Suter, P. and Tardieu, O. The serverless trilemma: Function composition for serverless computing. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN Intern. Symp. on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software.

Google Scholar

[8]

Barga, R.S. Serverless computing: Redefining the cloud [Internet]. In Proceedings of the 1st Intern. Workshop on Serverless Computing (Atlanta, GA, USA, June 5, 2017); http://www.serverlesscomputing.org/wosc17/#keynote

Google Scholar

[9]

Bernstein, D. Containers and cloud: From LXC to Docker to Kubernetes. IEEE Cloud Computing 1, 3 (Sept. 2014), 81--84.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[10]

Businesswire. $7.72 billion function-as-a-service market 2017---Global forecast to 2021: Increasing shift from Dev0ps to serverless computing to drive the overall Function-as-a-Service market; https://bwnews.pr/2G3ZzQY.

Google Scholar

[11]

CNCF Serverless White Paper; https://github.com/cncf/wg-serverless#whitepaper

Google Scholar

[12]

Etzioni, O. and Niblett, P. Event Processing in Action. Manning Publications Co., Greenwich, CT, 2010.

Google Scholar

[13]

Fouladi, S., Wahby, R.S., Shacklett, B., Balasubramaniam, K., Zeng, W., Bhalerao, R., Sivaraman, A., Porter, G. and Winstein, K. Encoding, fast and slow: Low-latency video processing using thousands of tiny threads. NSDI (2017), 363--376

Google Scholar

[14]

Fox, G.C., Ishakian, V., Muthusamy, V. and Slominski, A. Status of Serverless Computing and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) in Industry and Research. Technical Report; arXiv:1708.08028, 2017

Google Scholar

[15]

Hendrickson, S., Sturdevant, S., Harter; T., Venkataramani, V., Arpaci-Dusseau, A.C., Arpaci-Dusseau, R.H. Serverless computation with openlambda. In Proceeding of the 8^th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (Denver, CO, USA, June 20--21, 2016).

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[16]

IDC. IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2017 Predictions. IDC #US41883016, 2016.

Google Scholar

[17]

Ishakian, V., Muthusamy, V. and Slominski, A. Serving deep learning models in a serverless platform. In Proceedings of the IEEE Intern. Conf. on Cloud Engineering, 2018

Crossref

Google Scholar

[18]

Jonas, E., Pu, Q., Venkataraman, S., Stoica, I. and Recht, B. Occupy the cloud: Distributed computing for the 99%. In Proceedings of the 2017 Symp. on Cloud Computing.

Google Scholar

[19]

Kilcioglu, C. Rao, J.M. Kannan, A. and McAfee, R.P. Usage patterns and the economics of the public cloud. In Proceedings of the 26^th Intern. Conf. World Wide Web, 2017

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[20]

Lee, H., Satyam, K. and Fox, G.C. Evaluation of production serverless computing environments. In Proceedings of IEEE Cloud Conf. Workshop on Serverless Computing (San Francisco, CA, 2018).

Crossref

Google Scholar

[21]

Leitner, P., Wittern, E., Spillner, J. and Hummer, W. A mixed-method empirical study of Function-as-a-Service software development in industrial practice; https://peerj.com/preprints/27005

Google Scholar

[22]

Lin, W-T, Krintz, C., Wolski, R., Zhang, M., Cai, X., Li, T. and Xu, W. Tracking causal order in AWS lambda applications. In Proceedings of the IEEE Intern. Conf. on Cloud Engineering, 2018.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[23]

NGINX. NGINX announces results of 2016 future of application development and delivery survey; http://bit.ly/2YM27e2/.

Google Scholar

[24]

Oakes, E., Yang, L., Houck, K., Harter, T., Arpaci-Dusseau, A.C. and Arpaci-Dusseau, R.H. Pipsqueak: Lean Lambdas with large libraries. In Proceedings of 2017 IEEE 37^th Intern. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, 395--400.

Google Scholar

[25]

Paton, N.W. and Díaz, O. Active database systems. ACM Comput. Surv. 31, 1 (1999), 63--103.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[26]

Wang, L., Li, M., Zhang, Y., Ristenpart, T. and Swift, M. Peeking behind the curtains of serverless platforms. In Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conf., 2018, 133--146. USENIX Association.

Google Scholar

[27]

Yan, M., Castro, P., Cheng, P., Ishakian, V. Building a chatbot with serverless computing. In Proceedings of the 1^st Intern. Workshop on Mashups of Things, 2016.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[28]

Ye, W., Khan, A.I. and Kendall, E.A. Distributed network file storage for a serverless (P2P) network. In Proceedings of the 11^th IEEE Intern. Conf. on Networks, 2003, 343--347.

Crossref

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Gaber SAlenezi M(2024)Transforming Application Development With Serverless ComputingInternational Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing10.4018/IJCAC.36528814:1(1-16)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/IJCAC.365288
Vashishth TSharma VSharma KKumar BChaudhary SPanwar R(2024)Serverless Computing Real-World Applications and Benefits in Cloud EnvironmentsEmerging Trends in Cloud Computing Analytics, Scalability, and Service Models10.4018/979-8-3693-0900-1.ch014(268-290)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-0900-1.ch014
Vaibhav Vudayagiri (2024)Demystifying Serverless Architecture for Scalable Web ApplicationsInternational Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology10.32628/CSEIT2410617610:6(254-263)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.32628/CSEIT24106176
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The rise of serverless computing
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Distributed architectures
      1. Cloud computing
      2. n-tier architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Process management

Recommendations

Rise of the Planet of Serverless Computing: A Systematic Review
Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm, being adopted to develop a wide range of software applications. It allows developers to focus on the application logic in the granularity of function, thereby freeing developers from tedious ...
Serverless Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges
ACSW '21: Proceedings of the 2021 Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference

Born from a need for a pure “pay-per-use” model and highly scalable platform, the “Serverless” paradigm emerged and has the potential to become a dominant way of building cloud applications. Although it was originally designed for cloud environments, ...
Supporting Multi-Provider Serverless Computing on the Edge
ICPP Workshops '18: Workshop Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing

Serverless computing has recently emerged as a new execution model for cloud computing, in which service providers offer compute runtimes, also known as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms, allowing users to develop, execute and manage application ...

Reviews

Reviewer: Cathryn Peoples

In spite of a somewhat confusing introduction-"the server is dead, long live the server"-this informative article gives an overview of the relatively new phenomenon of serverless computing. It includes definitions of the serverless computing concept, the background and history, architectures, programming models, frameworks, and use cases. The earliest references to serverless computing are dated from 2016, which is an accurate representation of the field. Serverless computing is described as being most suited to applications with bursty loads; and the way it is currently deployed makes it challenging to support applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Serverless frameworks are contextualized using state-of-the-art technologies, which include OpenLambda, OpenFaaS, and Kubeless from academia, and Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft from industry. Written by experts from IBM and Bentley University, the authors interestingly discuss use cases of serverless computing in practice, which include Expedia and Coca-Cola. This is information that may be difficult to glean beyond this article. There is little to critique in this work. It is descriptive of the state of the art and is a well-rounded paper. Encouraging interest from a range of perspectives, the authors even consider serverless computing from the perspective of applications that demand secure operational environments. Two outputs of this work include discussion on the limitations of serverless computing, which leads into a description of its research challenges. It is expected that this detail will be influential in driving the next generation of serverless computing research.

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 62, Issue 12

December 2019

78 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/3372896

Editor:
Andrew A. Chien
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 November 2019

Published in CACM Volume 62, Issue 12

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article
Popular
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

231
Total Citations
View Citations
31,278
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1,567
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)121

Reflects downloads up to 24 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Gaber SAlenezi M(2024)Transforming Application Development With Serverless ComputingInternational Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing10.4018/IJCAC.36528814:1(1-16)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/IJCAC.365288
Vashishth TSharma VSharma KKumar BChaudhary SPanwar R(2024)Serverless Computing Real-World Applications and Benefits in Cloud EnvironmentsEmerging Trends in Cloud Computing Analytics, Scalability, and Service Models10.4018/979-8-3693-0900-1.ch014(268-290)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-0900-1.ch014
Vaibhav Vudayagiri (2024)Demystifying Serverless Architecture for Scalable Web ApplicationsInternational Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology10.32628/CSEIT2410617610:6(254-263)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.32628/CSEIT24106176
Schmollinger MGerstner JStricker EMuench ABreckwoldt BSigle MRosenberger PWunderlich R(2024)Evaluation of an App-Based Mobile Triage System for Mass Casualty Incidents: Within-Subjects Experimental StudyJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/6572826(e65728)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/65728
Ahmed AAbdul moid Ismat NManzar Ahmed Khan SAli Arshad J(2024)The Analysis the Performance of SDN Controller and AI System for Future NetworkVAWKUM Transactions on Computer Sciences10.21015/vtcs.v12i1.177712:1(65-75)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.21015/vtcs.v12i1.1777
Ahmed ASiddiqui FRizvi HRizvi JKhan AAhmed M(2024)The Comparison of Routing Algorithm for SDN Network using AI for Future NetworkVAWKUM Transactions on Computer Sciences10.21015/vtcs.v12i1.177612:1(34-48)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.21015/vtcs.v12i1.1776
Golec MWalia GKumar MCuadrado FGill SUhlig S(2024)Cold Start Latency in Serverless Computing: A Systematic Review, Taxonomy, and Future DirectionsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/370087557:3(1-36)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3700875
Sharma PFuerst A(2024)Accountable Carbon Footprints and Energy Profiling For Serverless FunctionsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698531(522-541)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698531
Kanas TRządca K(2024)Diminishing cold starts in serverless computing with approximation algorithmsProceedings of the 53rd International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3673038.3673118(327-336)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3673038.3673118
Hassan MSalvador JSantu SRahman A(2024)State Reconciliation Defects in Infrastructure as CodeProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36607901:FSE(1865-1888)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3660790
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Digital Edition

View this article in digital edition.

Digital Edition

Magazine Site

View this article on the magazine site (external)

Magazine Site

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Rise of the Planet of Serverless Computing: A Systematic Review

Serverless Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

Supporting Multi-Provider Serverless Computing on the Edge

Reviews

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Comments

Information

Published In

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View options

PDF

eReader

Digital Edition

Magazine Site

Login options

Full Access

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations