The Rise of Serverless Computing

Cloud computing in general, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in particular, have become widely accepted and adopted paradigms for computing with the offerings of virtual machines (VM) on demand. By 2020, 67% of enterprise IT infrastructure and software spending will be for cloud-based offerings.16 A major factor in the increased adoption of the cloud by enterprise IT was its pay-as-you-go model where a customer pays only for resources leased from the cloud provider and have the ability to get as many resources as needed with no up-front cost (elasticity).2 Unfortunately, the burden of scaling was left for developers and system designers that typically used overprovisioning techniques to handle sudden surges in service requests. Studies of reported usage of cloud resources in datacenters19 show a substantial gap between the resources that cloud customers allocate and pay for (leasing VMs), and actual resource utilization (CPU, memory, and so on). Serverless computing is emerging as a new and compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications, largely due to the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and microservices.23 Using serverless gives pay-as-you-go without additional work to start and stop server and is closer to original expectations for cloud computing to be treated like as a utility.2 Developers using serverless computing can get cost savings and scalability without needing to havea high level of cloud computing expertise that is time-consuming to acquire. Due to its simplicity and economical advantages, serverless computing is gaining popularity as reported by the increasing rate of the "serverless" search term by Google Trends. Its market size is estimated to grow to 7.72 billion by 2021.10 Most prominent cloud providers including Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others have already released serverless computing capabilities with several additional open source efforts driven by both industry and academic institutions (for example, see CNCF Serverless Cloud Native Landscapea).