The rise of serverless computing

Reviewer: Cathryn Peoples

In spite of a somewhat confusing introduction-"the server is dead, long live the server"-this informative article gives an overview of the relatively new phenomenon of serverless computing. It includes definitions of the serverless computing concept, the background and history, architectures, programming models, frameworks, and use cases. The earliest references to serverless computing are dated from 2016, which is an accurate representation of the field. Serverless computing is described as being most suited to applications with bursty loads; and the way it is currently deployed makes it challenging to support applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Serverless frameworks are contextualized using state-of-the-art technologies, which include OpenLambda, OpenFaaS, and Kubeless from academia, and Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft from industry. Written by experts from IBM and Bentley University, the authors interestingly discuss use cases of serverless computing in practice, which include Expedia and Coca-Cola. This is information that may be difficult to glean beyond this article. There is little to critique in this work. It is descriptive of the state of the art and is a well-rounded paper. Encouraging interest from a range of perspectives, the authors even consider serverless computing from the perspective of applications that demand secure operational environments. Two outputs of this work include discussion on the limitations of serverless computing, which leads into a description of its research challenges. It is expected that this detail will be influential in driving the next generation of serverless computing research.