A Systematic Mapping Study on Engineering Function-as-a-Service Platforms and Tools

Abstract

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.

Survey on serverless computing

“…The authors in [11] have conducted a systematic mapping study on serverless cloud computing. The main aim of their study is to concentrate on FaaS engineering.…”

“…Serverless computing runs function in a limited and short execution time, while there are some tasks might require long execution time. This does not support long execution running, since these functions are stateless, which means that if the function is paused it cannot be resumed again [11,202,234,280].…”

“…It mostly occurs when some containers fail. To overcome this challenge, a basic retry mechanism is used [11,210,235].…”

“…Then, the cloud provider takes responsibility for managing, scaling, and providing different resources to ensure the smooth running of these functions [8,9]. However, FaaS and the term "serverless" could be used interchangeably, as the FaaS platform automatically configures and maintains the execution context of functions and connects them to cloud services without requiring server provision by developers [10,11]. We refer to the FaaS when we use the term serverless computing.…”

Open-source Serverless Architectures: an Evaluation of Apache OpenWhisk

“…For a map of state-of-the-art research on the topic of FaaS platform and tooling engineering together with analysis of relations of the proposed concepts to existing solutions, the reader is referred to [15]: the mapping study on engineering FaaS platforms and tools provides insights on publication trends, the common challenges and drivers for research as well as information on industry participation in research publications. The reader interested in the evaluation of production serverless computing environments (AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Functions and IBM Apache OpenWhisk) is referred to [16], [17], [18].…”