Serverless is More: From PaaS to Present Cloud Computing
Erwin van Eyk, Lucian Toader, Sacheendra Talluri, Laurens Versluis, Alexandru Uta, Alexandru Iosup - IEEE Internet Computing, Sep/Oct edition, 2018
One of the key works of which I was the first author of in 2018 was the serverless is more paper. It was both the most interesting and fun one that I have co-written. With this paper we (the AtLarge Research team) aimed to investigate the past—how and why serverless computing has arisen— the present—why is it appealing to cloud users—and where is it heading—what are the main challenges and opportunities?
Abstract - In the late-1950s, leasing time on an IBM 704 cost hundreds of *dollars per minute. Today, cloud computing, that is, using IT as a service, *on-demand and pay-per-use, is a widely used computing paradigm that offers *large economies of scale. Born from a need to make platform as a service (PaaS) *more accessible, fine-grained, and affordable, serverless computing has *garnered interest from both industry and academia. This article aims to give an *understanding of these early days of serverless computing: what it is, where it *comes from, what is the current status of serverless technology, and what are *its main obstacles and opportunities.