Talk: SPEC RG CLOUD Serverless Activity - A Brief Overview @ HotCloudPerf 2018

April 9, 2018 · 1 minute read

With HotCloudPerf 2018 workshop being organized by the SPEC RG CLOUD, it provided us with the opportunity to introduce the activities of the group to the audience. I introduced the group along with a very brief introduction of serverless computing (it was already more thoroughly introduced in earlier talks.

It was lightning talk true to the word: the time allocated for this talk was 2-3 min.

Interestingly, this extremely tight time limit required me to prepare relatively more than the other talks. As part of the preparation I transcribed the talk contents:

Transcript Although I mentioned some aspects in my talk this morning, in the coming couple of minutes I want to introduce you to the serverless activity of the SPEC RG CLOUD group. It is a very active activity with participants of from both industry and academia. Including the organizations listed here.

So why should you care about this? Serverless computing is one of the main trends in cloud computing. The IT spending is expected to grow at least 30% year on year to reach 7 billion dollars. Even now, there reports that serverless is already seeing similar adoption to other older technologies such as containers for cloud applications.

This activity started last year May with the goal to explore the performance challenges in serverless computing.

So far this has resulted in now two publications, in which we survey the current state-of-the-art, propose a common terminology, and list the various challenges in this field.

Currently we are working on a reference architecture for FaaS platforms. The goal is to provide practitioners and researchers with a common model to reason about these FaaS platforms.

After that, we are going to focus on something that we all probably find fun here: benchmarking. We plan to provide the first comprehensive, objective benchmark of FaaS platforms. It is something that is currently missing, and badly needed.

We would love to here about your thoughts on this subject. So if you are interested in serverless computing, don’t hesitate to contact us. We welcome any form of contribution, involvement or collaboration.

Slides