The uphill journey of FaaS in the open-source community

Abstract

Since its introduction in 2014 by Amazon, the Function as a Service (FaaS) model of serverless computing has set the expectation to fulfill the promise of on-demand, pay-as-you-go, infrastructure-independent processing, originally formulated by cloud computing. Yet, serverless applications are fundamentally different than traditional service-oriented software in that they pose specific performance (e.g., cold start), design (e.g., stateless), and development challenges (e.g., debugging). A growing number of cloud solutions have been continuously attempting to address each of these challenges as a result of the increasing popularity of FaaS. Yet, the characteristics of this model have been poorly understood; therefore, the challenges are poorly tackled. In this paper, we assess the state of FaaS in open-source community with a study on almost 2K real-world serverless applications. Our results show a jeopardized ecosystem, where, despite the hype of serverless solutions in the last years, a number of challenges remain untackled, especially concerning component reuse, support for software development, and flexibility among different platforms — resulting in arguably slow adoption of the FaaS model. We believe that addressing the issues discussed in this paper may help researchers shaping the next generation of cloud computing models.