Serverless Computing: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Opportunities

TLDR

Serverless computing is gaining popularity because it reduces management overhead by executing at the function level, allowing users to focus on code while the platform handles scheduling and cost, and is expected to dominate future cloud platforms. The article surveys serverless infrastructure, identifies challenges and analyzes cutting‑edge solutions, and outlines future research opportunities to inspire practitioners. The authors conduct a comprehensive survey, pinpointing challenges and evaluating state‑of‑the‑art solutions in serverless systems. They assess typical open‑source frameworks and show how these frameworks mitigate the identified challenges.

Abstract

Serverless computing is growing in popularity by virtue of its lightweight and simplicity of management. It achieves these merits by reducing the granularity of the computing unit to the function level. Specifically, serverless allows users to focus squarely on the function itself while leaving other cumbersome management and scheduling issues to the platform provider, who is responsible for striking a balance between high-performance scheduling and low resource cost. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive survey of serverless computing with a particular focus on its infrastructure characteristics. Whereby some existing challenges are identified, and the associated cutting-edge solutions are analyzed. With these results, we further investigate some typical open-source frameworks and study how they address the identified challenges. Given the great advantages of serverless computing, it is expected that its deployment would dominate future cloud platforms. As such, we also envision some promising research opportunities that need to be further explored in the future. We hope that our work in this article can inspire those researchers and practitioners who are engaged in related fields to appreciate serverless computing, thereby setting foot in this promising area and making great contributions to its development.