In recent years, a plethora of deployment technologies evolved, many following a declarative approach to automate the delivery of software components. Even if such technologies share the same purpose, they differ in features and supported mechanisms. Thus, it is difficult to compare and select deployment automation technologies as well as to migrate from one technology to another. Hence, we present a systematic review of declarative deployment technologies and introduce the Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) by extracting the essential parts that are supported by all these technologies. Thereby, the EDMM enables a common understanding of declarative deployment models by facilitating the comparison, selection, and migration of technologies. Moreover, it provides a technology-independent baseline for further deployment automation research.

Emerging serverless computing technologies, such as function as a service (FaaS), enable developers to virtualize the internal logic of an application, simplifying the management of cloud-native services and allowing cost savings through billing and scaling at the level of individual functions. Serverless computing is therefore rapidly shifting the attention of software vendors to the challenge of developing cloud applications deployable on FaaS platforms. In this vision paper, we present the research agenda of the RADON project (http://radon-h2020.eu), which aims to develop a model-driven DevOps framework for creating and managing applications based on serverless computing. RADON applications will consist of fine-grained and independent microservices that can efficiently and optimally exploit FaaS and container technologies. Our methodology strives to tackle complexity in designing such applications, including the solution of optimal decomposition, the reuse of serverless functions as well as the abstraction and actuation of event processing chains, while avoiding cloud vendor lock-in through models.

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a novel cloud service model allowing to develop fine-grained, provider-managed cloud applications. In this work, we investigate which challenges motivate researchers to introduce or enhance FaaS platforms and tools. We use a systematic mapping study method to collect and analyze the relevant scientific literature, which helps us answering the three clearly-defined research questions. We design our study using well-established guidelines and systematically apply it to 62 selected publications. The collected and synthesized data provides useful insights into the main challenges that motivate researchers to work on this topic and can be helpful in identifying research gaps for future research.

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