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CLOUD COMPUTING IN general, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in particular, have become widely
accepted and adopted paradigms for computing with
the offerings of virtual machines (VM) on demand. By
2020, 67% of enterprise IT infrastructure and software
spending will be for cloud-based offerings. 16
A major factor in the increased adoption of the
cloud by enterprise IT was its pay-as-you-go model
where a customer pays only for resources leased
from the cloud provider and have the ability to get
as many resources as needed with no up-front cost
(elasticity). 2 Unfortunately, the burden of scaling was
left for developers and system designers that typically
used overprovisioning techniques to handle sudden
surges in service requests. Studies of reported usage
of cloud resources in datacenters19 show a substantial
gap between the resources that cloud customers
allocate and pay for (leasing VMs), and actual resource
utilization (CPU, memory, and so on).
Serverless computing is emerging as a new and
compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud
applications, largely due to the recent
shift of enterprise application archi-
tectures to containers and microser-
vices. 23 Using serverless gives pay-as-
you-go without additional work to start
and stop server and is closer to original
expectations for cloud computing to
be treated like as a utility. 2 Develop-
ers using serverless computing can get
cost savings and scalability without
needing to havea high level of cloud
computing expertise that is time-con-
suming to acquire.
Due to its simplicity and economical advantages, serverless computing
is gaining popularity as reported by
the increasing rate of the “serverless”
search term by Google Trends. Its market size is estimated to grow to 7. 72 billion by 2021.10 Most prominent cloud
providers including Amazon, IBM,
Microsoft, Google, and others have already released serverless computing
capabilities with several additional
open source efforts driven by both industry and academic institutions (for
example, see CNCF Serverless Cloud
Native Landscapea).
From the perspective of an IaaS customer, the serverless paradigm shift
presents both an opportunity and a
risk. On the one hand, it provides developers with a simplified programming model for creating cloud applications that abstracts away most, if
a https://s.cncf.io/
The Rise of
Serverless
Computing
DOI: 10.1145/3368454
The server is dead, long live the server.
BY PAUL CASTRO, VATCHE ISHAKIAN,
VINOD MUTHUSAMY, AND ALEKSANDER SLOMINSKI
key insights
˽ Serverless computing takes the original
promises of cloud computing and
delivers true pay only for resources
used with almost infinite scalability
while hiding the details of how servers
are used and maintained.
˽ Serverless computing is a new cloud
computing paradigm with enormous
economic growth potential.
˽ Serverless computing allows the
developer to focus on developing
business logic and gives the cloud
provider additional control over
optimizing resources.
˽ There are many technical challenges
and opportunities for research.