A Review of Serverless Frameworks

Abstract

Serverless computing is a new computing paradigm that promises to revolutionize the way applications are built and provisioned. In this computing kind, small pieces of software called functions are deployed in the cloud with zero administration and minimal costs for the software developer. Further, this computing kind has various applications in areas like image processing and scientific computing. Due to the above advantages, the current uptake of serverless computing is being addressed by traditional big cloud providers like Amazon, who offer serverless platforms for serverless application deployment and provisioning. However, as in the case of cloud computing, such providers attempt to lock-in their customers with the supply of complementary services which provide added-value support to serverless applications. To this end, to resolve this issue, serverless frameworks have been recently developed. Such frameworks either abstract away from serverless platform specificities, or they enable the production of a mini serverless platform on top of existing clouds. However, these frameworks differ in various features that do have an impact on the serverless application lifecycle. To this end, to assist the developers in selecting the most suitable framework, this paper attempts to review these frameworks according to a certain set of criteria that directly map to the application lifecycle. Further, based on the review results, some remaining challenges are supplied, which when confronted will make serverless frameworks highly usable and suitable for the handling of both serverless as well as mixed application kinds.