Research Area:  Cloud Computing

Abstract:

Serverless computing offers the potential to program the cloud in an autoscaling, pay-as-you go manner. In this paper we address critical gaps in first-generation serverless computing, which place its autoscaling potential at odds with dominant trends in modern computing: notably data-centric and distributed computing, but also open source and custom hardware. Put together, these gaps make current serverless offerings a bad fit for cloud innovation and particularly bad for data systems innovation. In addition to pinpointing some of the main shortfalls of current serverless architectures, we raise a set of challenges we believe must be met to unlock the radical potential that the cloud---with its exabytes of storage and millions of cores---should offer to innovative developers.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jose Faleiro, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Alexey Tumanov, Chenggang Wu

Publisher name:  arXiv

DOI:  arXiv:1812.03651

Volume Information:  Volume

Paper Link:   https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03651