Optimizing and Extending Serverless Platforms: A Survey

Serverless Computing is a new cloud computing paradigm wherein people in academia and industry are actively proposing either interesting improvements or building excellent applications on top of it. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM are popular samples of public clouds that offer Function-as-a-Service on top of their Serverless Computing platforms. Although this paradigm has had numerous advantages for software developers and programmers, it has introduced new challenges to cloud providers. Factors like fine-grained pricing and pay-as-you-go manner, eliminating the responsibility of resource management on the developer side, promises of elasticity and highly-available service, fault tolerance, auto-scaling, and being able to run embarrassingly parallel jobs make it a suitable platform for developers. On the other hand, efficient resource management, offering low-latency service, and providing proper security/isolation have been partly the main challenges introduced on the cloud provider side. This paper presents a literature review on today's Serverless platform optimizations and extensions that people have proposed and implemented to further capitalize the Serverless infrastructure. In the end, we will provide the current Serverless paradigm's limitations and a few future directions and research opportunities regarding Serverless Computing.