Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jose Faleiro, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Alexey Tumanov and Chenggang Wu UC Berkeley {hellerstein,jmfaleiro,jegonzal,jssmith,vikrams,atumanov,cgwu}@berkeley.edu
ABSTRACT Serverless computing offers the potential to program the cloud in an autoscaling, pay-as-you go manner. In this paper we address critical gaps in first-generation serverless computing, which place its autoscaling potential at odds with dominant trends in modern computing: notably data-centric and distributed computing, but also open source and custom hardware. Put together, these gaps make current serverless offerings a bad fit for cloud innovation and particularly bad for data systems innovation. In addition to pinpointing some of the main shortfalls of current serverless architectures, we raise a set of challenges we believe must be met to unlock the radical potential that the cloud—with its exabytes of storage and millions of cores—should offer to innovative developers.
arxiv.org |
