Serverless Computing: Introduction and Research Challenges

Serverless computing is a technology that offers the ability to create modular, highly-scalable, fault-tolerant applications, leveraging container-based virtualisation to deploy applications and services. It is revolutionising the way we think about application development, and serverless platforms are already ubiquitous in the public and private sectors. Commercial solutions dominate the market with widespread adoption from industry giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, though open-source solutions do exist such as Apache OpenWhisk, Fission and OpenFaaS. This tutorial will present the state-of-the-art in serverless computing research, and provide useful insights into the main challenges that motivate researchers to work on this topic. It will also identify research gaps for future research.