Communications of the ACM

contributed articles

I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y P E T E R B O L L I N G E R

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.