What serverless computing is and should become

Schleier-Smith, Johann; Sreekanti, Vikram; Khandelwal, Anurag; Carreira, João; Yadwadkar, Neeraja J.; Popa, Raluca Ada; Gonzalez, Joseph E.; Stoica, Ion; Patterson, David A.

doi:10.1145/3406011

Cited by 154 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This idea of a supercomputer-by-the-second also appears in previous wok of the same authors [11]. Recently, serverless has been presented as the next generation of cloud computing, reinforcing the idea of general purpose use instead of the narrow uses cases considered today [27].…”

Section: General Purpose Serverlessmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…In contrast, we are interested in solving these same issues but using the infrastructure provided by cloud vendors. It has been claimed that, in such settings, adding networking makes no sense [27] because it would remove the ability of the cloud vendor to optimize the deployment. As Boxer shows, it is possible to add networking to FaaS without affecting any of its underlying properties or restricting the possibility of optimizing the deployment.…”

Section: Communication Through Proxiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another key limitation of serverless platforms is that they do not allow users to optimize the placement of functions to improve performance [27]. By supporting direct networking between functions, cloud providers can get a complete picture of the communication patterns of an application and use this information to optimize function placement [21].…”

Section: Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Serverless computing platforms such as AWS Lambda [4], Google Cloud Functions [13], and Azure Functions [23] offer highly elastic computing and fine-grained resource billing (as low as milliseconds [5]), while raising the level of abstraction for user interaction with the cloud [27]. Although serverless platforms cost more per hour than resources on virtual machines [8], the fine-grained cost model still makes serverless computing cost-effective for jobs with short execution times and sporadic invocation patterns [11,24,25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Short-lived Datacenter

Wawrzoniak¹,

Müller²,

Bruno³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Serverless platforms have attracted attention due to their promise of elasticity, low cost, and fast deployment. Instead of using a fixed virtual machine (VM) infrastructure, which can incur considerable costs to operate and run, serverless platforms support short computations, triggered on demand, with cost proportional to fine-grain function execution time. However, serverless platforms offer a restricted execution environment. For example, functions have limited execution times, limited resources, and no support for networking between functions. In this paper, we explore what it takes to treat serverless platforms as short-lived, general purpose datacenters which can execute unmodified existing applications. As a first step in this quest, we have developed Boxer, a system providing an execution environment on top of existing functions-as-a-service platforms that allows users to seamlessly migrate conventional VM-based cloud services to serverless platforms. Boxer allows generic applications to benefit from the fine-grain elasticity of serverless platforms without having to modify applications to adopt a restrictive event-triggered programming model or orchestrate auxiliary systems for data communication. We implement Boxer on top of AWS Lambda and extend it to transparently provide standard network interfaces. We describe its implementation and demonstrate how it can be used to run off-the-shelf cloud applications with a degree of fine-grained elasticity not available on traditional VM-based platforms.

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Section: General Purpose Serverlessmentioning

confidence: 78%

Section: Communication Through Proxiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Short-lived Datacenter

Wawrzoniak¹,

Müller²,

Bruno³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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show abstract

“…Several surveys in serverless computing have discussed the characteristics of serverless generalization [15,52,65,112,116,144]. However, they only propose literature reviews from a high-level perspective while ignoring to provide enough architecture implications.…”

Section: Survey Methods By the Layered Serverless Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Serverless Computing Survey: A Technical Primer for Design Architecture

et al. 2022

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The development of cloud infrastructures inspires the emergence of cloud-native computing. As the most promising architecture for deploying microservices, serverless computing has recently attracted more and more attention in both industry and academia. Due to its inherent scalability and flexibility, serverless computing becomes attractive and more pervasive for ever-growing Internet services. Despite the momentum in the cloud-native community, the existing challenges and compromises still wait for more advanced research and solutions to further explore the potentials of the serverless computing model. As a contribution to this knowledge, this article surveys and elaborates the research domains in the serverless context by decoupling the architecture into four stack layers: Virtualization, Encapsule, System Orchestration, and System Coordination. Inspired by the security model, we highlight the key implications and limitations of these works in each layer, and make suggestions for potential challenges to the field of future serverless computing.

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SMSE: A serverless platform for multimedia cloud systems

Denninnart,

Amini Salehi

2023

Concurrency and Computation

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SummaryAlong with the rise of domain‐specific computing (ASICs hardware) and domain‐specific programming languages, we envision that the next step is the emergence of domain‐specific cloud platforms. Considering multimedia streaming as one of the most trendy applications in the IT industry, the goal of this study is to develop serverless multimedia streaming engine (SMSE), the first domain‐specific serverless platform for multimedia streaming. SMSE democratizes multimedia service development via enabling content providers (or even end‐users) to rapidly develop their desired functionalities on their multimedia contents. Upon developing SMSE, the next goal of this study is to deal with its efficiency challenges and develop a function container provisioning method that can efficiently utilize cloud resources and improve the users' quality of service. In particular, we develop a dynamic method that provisions durable or ephemeral containers depending on the spatiotemporal and data‐dependency characteristics of the functions. Evaluating the prototype implementation of SMSE under real‐world settings demonstrates its capability to reduce both the containerization overhead, and the makespan time of serving multimedia processing functions (by up to 30%) in compare to the function provision methods that are being used in the general‐purpose serverless cloud systems.

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What serverless computing is and should become

Abstract: The evolution that serverless computing represents, the economic forces that shape it, why it could fail, and how it might fulfill its potential.

Cited by 154 publications

References 13 publications

Short-lived Datacenter

Short-lived Datacenter

The Serverless Computing Survey: A Technical Primer for Design Architecture

SMSE: A serverless platform for multimedia cloud systems

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