In the late-1950s, leasing time on an IBM 704 cost hundreds of dollars per minute. Today, cloud computing, that is, using IT as a service, on-demand and pay-per-use, is a widely used computing paradigm that offers large economies of scale. Born from a need to make platform as a service (PaaS) more accessible, fine-grained, and affordable, serverless computing has garnered interest from both industry and academia. This article aims to give an understanding of these early days of serverless computing: what it is, where it comes from, what is the current status of serverless technology, and what are its main obstacles and opportunities. The 1950s saw the emergence of two technologies that are currently shaping the world: containerization in shipping and timesharing in computing. By allowing shipping to become standardized and automated, the former gave rise to manufacturing and retail ecosystems, and ultimately to the economic phenomenon of globalization 1. By enabling multiple clients to share the same physical infrastructure, time-sharing gave rise to cloud computing and the modern digital ecosystems, which are key drivers for growth in knowledge-based societies 2. Whereas few could afford the costs of time-sharing services and paid dearly for simple computer simulations in the late-1950s, today over 80% of companies use the hundreds of services accessible as cloud computing (source: Studies by European Commission 3 and Cloudability (2018)), along with many private individuals. Following with remarkable regularity the evolution observed in the history of containerization, cloud services have adapted to offer better fitting containers that require less time to load (boot) and provide higher automation in handling (orchestrating) containers on behalf of the client. Serverless computing promises more: to achieve full-automation in managing fine-grained containers. Already,
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High-quality designs of distributed systems and services are essential for our digital economy and society. Threatening to slow down the stream of working designs, we identify the mounting pressure of scale and complexity of (eco-)system, of ill-defined and wicked problems, and of unclear processes, methods, and tools. We envision design itself as a core research topic in distributed systems, to understand and improve the science and practice of distributed (eco-)system design. Toward this vision, we propose the ATLARGE design framework, accompanied by a set of 8 core design principles. We also propose 10 key challenges, which we hope the community can address in the following 5 years. In our experience so far, the proposed framework and principles are practical, and lead to pragmatic and innovative designs for large-scale distributed systems. arXiv:1902.05416v1 [cs.DC] 14 Feb 2019 2. Why Focus on MCS Design?We argue in this section for the timely and important need to focus on MCS design. Not only is (good) design needed (Section 2.1), but we identify an increasing need for good design (Section 2.2) and designers (Section 2.3).We also analyze what good design needs to address, that is, complex challenges from system design (Section 2.4) and from MCS design (Section 2.5).3. We anonymize the venue, but consider it relevant because its held year is after 2014, the venue is a conference, and its ranking is A in CORE18 and green in MSAR14. For comparison, ICDCS has these rankings too.4. We anonymize the university, but consider the course relevant because it is large, it took place after 2014, and the university is ranked in the top-150 (in computer science) in both the THE and the QS 2018 World University Rankings (out of nearly 1,000 universities), and in Webometrics of July 18 (out of over 28,000).
General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
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