Introduction
Related works
Research methodology
Research questions
-
RQ1. What is the number and distribution of studies published on serverless computing in the period (2016–2020)?
-
RQ2. Which researchers, organizations, and countries are active in serverless computing research?
-
RQ3. What are the differences between serverless computing and traditional cloud computing?
-
RQ4. What are the benefits of using serverless computing?
-
RQ5. What are the most used software platforms that enable serverless computing in the literature?
-
RQ6. What are the application areas of serverless computing in the literature?
-
RQ7. What are the challenges and issues of using serverless computing?
-
RQ8. What tools are available for serverless computing? (serverless tools)
-
RQ9. What are the available research approaches to analyze the migration of monolithic applications to serverless computing?
-
RQ10. What are the potential future directions of research on serverless computing?
Search strategy
Literature sources
Source | URL |
---|---|
IEEE Xplore | |
Elsevier ScienceDirect | |
ACM Digital Library | |
Scopus | |
SpringerLink |
Search string
Paper inclusion/exclusion criteria
-
Publications in the field of software engineering and computer science.
-
Publications published online from 2016 – 2020.
-
Publications related directly to serverless computing.
-
Publications not published in English.
-
Publications without accessible full text.
-
Publications not formally peer reviewed (e.g., gray literature).
-
Publications not published electronically.
-
Publications that are duplicates of other previous publications.
Results
Distribution of publications (RQ1)
Publication frequency
Publication venue
Acronym | Journal Full Name |
---|---|
FGCS | Future Generation Computer Systems |
IoT-J | Internet of Things Journal |
JSS | Journal of Systems and Software |
Clust. Comput. | Cluster Computing |
IEEE Access | IEEE Access |
IEEE Internet Comput. | IEEE Internet Computing |
PACMPL | Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages |
SICS | Software-Intensive Cyber-Physical Systems |
TPDS | IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems |
Acronym | Conference Full Name |
---|---|
WOSC | International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WOSC) |
Cloud | International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud) |
UCC | International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC) |
SoCC | Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) |
Middleware | International Middleware Conference (Middleware) |
IC2E | International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) |
ICPE | International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) |
USENIX ATC | USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC) |
CCGRID | International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID) |
DEBS | International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) |
ESOCC | European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (ESOCC) |
HotCloud | Conference on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud) |
ICDCS | International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) |
ICDCSW | International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW) |
ICFC | International Conference on Fog Computing (ICFC) |
JCC | International Conference on Joint Cloud Computing (JCC) |
SAC | Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) |
SEC | Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC) |
SYSTOR | International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR) |
XP | International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP) |
Active researchers (RQ2)
Organization | Author(s) | Published Paper | Total |
---|---|---|---|
IBM Research, United States | Alaa Youssef, Aleksander Slominski, Ali Anwar, Ali Kanso, Animesh Trivedi, Bruce Slawson, Canturk Isci, Dan Williams, Dimitrios Skourtis, Eric Rozner, Erik Wittern, Ioana Baldini, Jonas Pfefferle, Kerry Shih-Ping Chang, Lionel Villard, Lukas Rupprecht, Michael Maximilien, Nick Mitchell, Nilton Bila, Nima Kaviani, Nirmal K Mukhi, Olivier Tardieu, Paolo Dettori, Patrick Stuedi, Paul Castro, Pedro Garcáa López, Perry Cheng, Philippe Suter, Prabhakar Kudva, Ricardo Koller, Rodric Rabbah, Shripad Nadgowda, Srijith Prabhu, Stephen Fink, Vasily Tarasov, Vatche Ishakian, Vinod Muthusamy, Waldemar Hummer | 23 | |
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany | Jorn Kuhlenkamp, Sebastian Werner, Maria C. Borges, Stefan Tai, Johannes Müller, Richard Girke, Jörn Kuhlenkamp, Dominik Ernst, Frank Pallas, Niklas Anders, Nebi Mucaj, Olesia Tsaplina, Christian Schmidt, Kann Yildirim, Tobias Pfandzelter, David Bermbach, Ahmet-Serdar Karakaya, Simon Buchholz, Setareh Maghsudi, Jonathan Hasenburg | 10 | |
Universitat Rovira i Virgili,Spain | Pedro Garcáa López, Marc Sánchez-Artigas, Gerard Pará, Daniel Barcelona Pons, Álvaro Ruiz, David Arroyo Pinto, Josep Sampé, Amanda Gómez-Gómez, Mariano Ezequiel Mirabelli, Germán T. Eizaguirre, Aitor Arjona | 9 | |
University of California, Berkeley, United States | Andrew Zhang, Benjamin Recht, Chenggang Wu, Dominic Carrano, Ion Stoica, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Joao Carreira, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Kannan Ramchandran, Karl Krauth, Ken Goldberg, Qifan Pu, Randy Katz, Samuel Paradis, Saurav Chhatrapati, Scott Shenker, Thomas Courtade, Vaishaal Shankar, Vikram Sreekanti, Vipul Gupta, Vivian Fang, Wen Zhang, Yaoqing Yang | 8 | |
University of Washington, Tacoma, United States | Baojia Zhang, David Foster, David Perez, Derek Chen, Dimitar Kumanov, Eyhab Al-Masri, Hanfei Yu, Ibrahim Diabate, Ka Yee Yeung, Ling-Hong Hung, Ming Hoi Lam, Minh Vu, Mohammadbagher Fotouhi, Rashad Hatchett, Richa Jain, Robert Cordingly, Shruti Ramesh, Swetha Chinthalapati, Swetha Reddy Nathala, Varik Hoang, Wen Shu, Wes Lloyd, Xingzhi Niu, Zohreh Sadeghi | 8 | |
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands | Lucian Toader, Alexandru Uta, Ahmed Musaafir, Alexandru Iosup, Laurens Versluis, Erwin Van Eyk | 8 | |
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States | Aditya Akella, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Arjun Singhvi, Dennis Zhou, Edward Oakes, Kevin Houck, Leon Yang, Liang Wang, Michael Swift, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Scott Hendrickson, Shivaram Venkataraman, Stephen Sturdevant, Tyler Harter, Venkateshwaran Venkataramani | 7 | |
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands | Erwin Van Eyk, Alexandru Iosup, Sacheendra Talluri | 6 | |
Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador | Gabriel Aumala, Edwin F. Boza, Luis Ortiz-Avilés, Gustavo Totoy, Cristina L. Abad, Mónica Villavicencio, Stephany Quimba | 6 | |
Stanford University, United States | Ana Klimovic, Yawen Wang, Christos Kozyrakis, Sadjad Fouladi, Keith Winstein, Kostis Kaffes, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Sean Choi, Muhammad Shahbaz, Balaji Prabhakar, Mendel Rosenblum, Kailas Vodrahalli | 6 | |
University of Bamberg, Germany | Johannes Manner, Martin Endreß, Tobias Heckel, Guido Wirtz, Stefan Kolb, Stefan Winzinger, Marcel Großmann, Christos Ioannidis, Duy Thanh Le, Mike Prechtl, Robin Lichtenthäler | 6 | |
Imperial College London, United Kingdom | Robert Chatley, Alim Ul Gias, Giuliano Casale, Alessandra Russo, Lulai Zhu, Jessica Vandebon, José G. F. Coutinho, Wayne Luk | 5 | |
Kookmin University, South Korea | Jeongchul Kim, Kyungyong Lee, Jungae Park, Hyunjune Kim, Jaeghang Choi | 5 | |
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China | Mingyu Wu, Zeyu Mi, Yubin Xia, Zijun Li, Quan Chen, Shuai Xue, Minyi Guo, Dong Du, Tianyi Yu, Binyu Zang, Haibo Chen, Qingyuan Liu, Ziqian Lu, Jinfeng Liu, Zheng Huang, Zhichao Hua | 5 | |
Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain | Alfonso Pérez, Germán Moltó, Miguel Caballer, Amanda Calatrava, Sebastián Risco, Diana M. Naranjo, V. Giménez-Alventosa, Carlos De Alfonso, Ignacio Blanquer | 5 | |
University of Alberta, Canada | Di Niu, Sara Ghaemi, Alireza Goli, Omid Hajihassani, Omid Ardakanian, Moe Rashidi, Tyler Dauphinee, Nima Mahmoudi | 5 | |
University of Stuttgart, Germany | Michael Wurster, Uwe Breitenbücher, Kálmán Képes, Frank Leymann, Vladimir Yussupov, Michael Hahn, Christian Müller, André van Hoorn | 5 | |
Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland | Josef Spillner, Seán Murphy, William Martini, Bill Bosshard | 5 | |
IBM Research, Israel | Alex Glikson, Gil Vernik | 4 | |
Intel Corporation, United States | Michael Steiner, Ramesh G. Illikkal, Eriko Nurvitadhi, Mishali Naik, Anup Mohan, Harshad Sane, Kshitij Doshi, Saikrishna Edupuganti, Naren Nayak | 4 | |
Microsoft Research, United States | Lan Ly, Mohammad Shahrad, Rodrigo Fonseca,Íñigo Goiri, Gohar Chaudhry, Paul Batum, Jason Cooke, Eduardo Laureano, Colby Tresness, Mark Russinovich, Ricardo Bianchini, Tyler Harter, Jose M. Faleiro | 4 | |
Platform9 Inc., United States | Erwin Van Eyk | 4 | |
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States | Matthew Obetz, Anirban Das, Timothy Castiglia, Stacy Patterson, Ana Milanova, Shigeru Imai, Andrew Leaf, Carlos A. Varela | 4 | |
University of California, Santa Barbara, United States | Wei-Tsung Lin, Chandra Krintz, Rich Wolski, Michael Zhang, Fatih Bakir, Gareth George | 4 | |
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States | Mengting Yan, Pubali Datta, Adam Bates, Arnav Sankaran, Tarek Elgamal | 4 | |
University of Tartu, Estonia | Chinmaya Kumar Dehury, Satish Narayana Srirama, Tek Raj Chhetri, Pelle Jakovits | 4 | |
University of Würzburg, Germany | Johannes Grohmann, Simon Eismann, André Bauer, Norbert Schmitt, Nikolas Herbst, Samuel Kounev | 4 | |
York University, Canada | Hamzeh Khazaei | 4 | |
AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland | Maciej Malawski, Adam Gajek, Adam Zima, Bartosz Balis, Kamil Figiela, Piotr Moczurad, Maciej Pawlik, Pawel Banach | 3 | |
Boston University, United States | Anthony Byrne, Ayse K. Coskun, Nabeel Akhtar, Ali Raza, Ibrahim Matta, James Cadden, Thomas Unger, Yara Awad, Han Dong, Orran Krieger, Jonathan Appavoo | 3 | |
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary | David Balla, Markosz Maliosz, Csaba Simon, János Czentye, Balázs Sonkoly | 3 | |
Einstein Center Digital Future Mobile Cloud Computing Research Group, Germany | Tobias Pfandzelter, David Bermbach, Ahmet-Serdar Karakaya, Simon Buchholz, Setareh Maghsudi, Jonathan Hasenburg | 3 | |
George Mason University, United States | Benjamin Carver, Jingyuan Zhang, Ao Wang, Yue Cheng | 3 | |
George Washington University, United States | Guyue Liu, Timothy Wood, Phani Kishore Gadepalli, Sean Mcbride, Gregor Peach, Gabriel Parmer | 3 | |
Google Inc., United States | Qifan Pu, Junaid Khalid, Vadim Sukhomlinov | 3 | |
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India | Nikhila Somu, Nilanjan Daw, Umesh Bellur, Purushottam Kulkarni, S. C. Gupta | 3 | |
Macquarie University, Australia | Young Choon Lee | 3 | |
Stony Brook University, United States | Amoghavarsha Suresh, Gagan Somashekar, Anandh Varadarajan, Veerendra Ramesh Kakarla, Hima Upadhyay, Anshul Gandhi, Prabuddha Kumar, Amir Rahmati | 3 | |
University of Colorado Boulder, United States | Zaid Al-Ali, Sepideh Goodarzy, Ethan Hunter, Sangtae Ha, Richard Han, Eric Keller, Erika Hunhoff, Shazal Irshad, Ali Tariq, Eric Rozner, Austin Pahl, Sharat Nimmagadda, Siddharth Lanka | 3 | |
University of Gothenburg, Sweden | Philipp Leitner, Joel Scheuner | 3 | |
University of Sydney, Australia | Mohammadreza Hoseinyfarahabady, Albert Y. Zomaya, Young Ki Kim | 3 | |
University of Waterloo, Canada | Matt Crane, Jimmy Lin, Youngbin Kim, N. Asokan | 3 |
Serverless computing vs. traditional cloud
Factors | Traditional cloud computing | Serverless computing |
---|---|---|
Development phase | Difficult | Easy |
Automatic scalability | Unavailable | Available |
Stateful applications | Easy | Difficult |
Security | Complex and less secure | Easy and more secure |
Functions’ life cycle | Long | Short |
Troubleshooting and debugging | Easy | Difficult |
Server and hardware configuration and maintenance | Required | Unavailable |
Failure tolerance | Less reliable | More reliable |
Cost (Variable workload) | Expensive | Affordable |
Cost (Stable workload) | Affordable | Expensive |
Applicable user | Administrator and developer | Developer |
Benefits of serverless computing (RQ4)
Cost effective
Scalability
Server-side management
Easy to deploy
Decrease latency
Serverless platforms in the literature (RQ5)
The application areas of serverless computing in the literature (RQ6)
Chatbot
Information retrieval
File processing
Smart grid
Security
Networks
IoT
Application Area | Papers | Total |
---|---|---|
Edge Computing | 25 | |
Security | 20 | |
IoT | 19 |
Edge computing
Serverless computing challenges and issues (RQ7)
Cost and pricing model
Challenges and Issues | Paper | Total |
---|---|---|
Performance | 33 | |
Cold start | 17 | |
Security | 13 | |
Programming and debugging | 13 | |
Cost and pricing | 11 |
Cold start
Resource limits
Security
Scalability
Long-running
Programming & debugging
Vendor lock-in
Performance
Fault tolerance
Function composition
Resource sharing
Testing
Naming and addressing system
Legacy systems
Managing hybrid cloud
Lack of quality of service (QoS) support
Architecture complexity
Interactions tracking
Concurrency management
Tools available for serverless computing (RQ8)
Migration of monolithic applications to serverless computing (RQ9)
Future directions of research (RQ10)
Function startup
QoS
Pricing
Legacy systems
Debugging, testing, and benchmarking
Threats to validity
-
Coverage of research questions: All up-to-date research aspects of serverless computing might not be included in this study. To overcome this threat, the brainstorming was conducted by all the authors in determining the most current research questions in the area.
-
Coverage of related papers: The process of obtaining all the related studies in serverless computing cannot be secured. In this study, various literature databases were employed; moreover, the method based on different terms and synonymous is followed by all the authors in determining the related questions.
-
Paper inclusion/exclusion criteria: The individual bias and interpretation could affect the implementation of the criteria. Therefore, to solve this problem, the agreements of all authors were considered in excluding or including a paper.
-
Accuracy of data extraction: The individual experience effects extracting the data, therefore online meetings were conducted after the data extraction process by each author. During the meetings, the outcomes from each author were compared with other findings to determine the differences and reach a final consensus.
-
Reproducibility of the study: Whether other researchers could obtain similar outcomes of this study is another threat. Thus, to address this, the research methodology contains the well-explained steps and actions conducted in this paper (as shown in “Research methodology” section).