Abstract
In recent years, the adoption of serverless computing has surged due to the ease of deployment, attractive pay-per-use pricing, and transparent horizontal auto-scaling. At the same time, infrastructure advancements such as the emergence of 5G networks, the explosion of devices connected to the Internet known as the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as new application requirements that constrain where computation and data can happen, will expand the reach of Cloud computing beyond traditional data centers into the emergent Hybrid Cloud market that is predicted to expand to over a trillion dollars in next few years. In Hybrid Cloud environments, driven by serverless tenants, there is an increased need to focus on enabling productive work for application builders using a distributed platform consisting of public clouds, private clouds, and edge systems. In this chapter we investigate how far serverless computing can be extended to become Hybrid Serverless Computing, outline its definition, describe steps towards achieving it, and identify opportunities and challenges.
Paul Castro, Vatche Isahagian, Vinod Muthusamy, Aleksander Slominski—equal contributions to the paper.
All four authors of this chapter have deep expertise in serverless middleware. They were part of the founding team from IBM Research who worked on the Apache OpenWhisk Serverless project and the IBM Cloud Functions platform. Furthermore, they have been constant contributors to raise the awareness and advancement of Serverless computing since its beginning through tutorial presentations (at ICDCS 2017), organization of multiple workshops (https://www.serverlesscomputing.org/), speaking at seminars, and contributing several papers in top conferences and journals on serverless computing. Some of the noteworthy contributions are a cover article on serverless computing in Communications of the ACM, and a book chapter in Chaudhary, S., Somani, G. and Buyya, R. eds., 2017, Research advances in cloud computing, Springer.
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Castro, P., Isahagian, V., Muthusamy, V., Slominski, A. (2023). Hybrid Serverless Computing: Opportunities and Challenges. In: Krishnamurthi, R., Kumar, A., Gill, S.S., Buyya, R. (eds) Serverless Computing: Principles and Paradigms. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 162. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26633-1_3
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