Serverless Computing (Dagstuhl Seminar 21201)

Abstract

In the backbone of our digital society, cloud computing enables an efficient, utility-like ecosystem of developing, composing, and providing software services. Responding to a trend to make cloud computing services more accessible, fine-grained, and affordable, serverless computing has gained rapid adoption in practice, and garnered much interest from both industry and academia. However successful, serverless computing manifests today the opportunities and challenges of emerging technology: a rapidly growing field but scattered vision, plenty of new technologies but no coherent approach to design solutions from them, many simple applications but no impressive advanced solution, the emergence of a cloud continuum (resources from datacenters to the edge) but no clear path to leverage it efficiently, and overall much need but also much technical complexity. Several related but disjoint fields, notably software and systems engineering, parallel and distributed systems, and system and performance analysis and modeling, aim to address these opportunities and challenges. Excellent collaboration between these fields in the next decade will be critical in establishing serverless computing as a viable technology. We organized this Dagstuhl seminar to bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners across disciplines in serverless computing, to develop a vision and detailed answers to the timely and relevant, open challenges related to the following topics: - Topic 1: design decisions for serverless systems, platforms, and ecosystems, - Topic 2: software engineering of serverless applications, but also systems, platforms, and ecosystems - Topic 3: applications and domain requirements for serverless computing, - Topic 4: evaluation of serverless solutions, and beyond (privacy, cyber-physical systems, etc.). In this document, we report on the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 21201 Serverless Computing by integrating diverse views and synthesizing a shared vision for the next decade of serverless computing.