A Literature Review on Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm. Moreover, it has become an attractive development option for cloud-based applications for software developers. The most significant advantage of serverless computing is to free software developers from the burden of complex underlying management tasks and allow them to focus on only the application logic implementation. Based on its benign characteristics and bright prospect, it has been an increasingly hot topic in various scenarios, such as machine learning, scientific computing, video processing, and the Internet of Things. However, none of the studies focuses on a comprehensive analysis of the current research state of the art of serverless computing from the research scope and depth. To fill this knowledge gap, we present a comprehensive literature review to summarize the current research state of the art of serverless computing. This review is based on selected 164 research papers to answer three key aspects, i.e., research directions (What), existing solutions (How), and platforms and venues (Where). Specifically, first, we construct a taxonomy linked to research directions about the serverless computing literature. Our taxonomy has 18 research categories covering performance optimization, programming framework, application migration, multi-cloud development, cost, testing, debugging, etc. Second, we classify the related studies of each research direction and elaborate on existing solutions. Third, we investigate the distributions of experimental platforms for existing techniques and publication venues for selected research papers. Finally, based on our analysis, we discuss some key challenges and envision promising opportunities for future research on the serverless platform side, serverless application side, and serverless computing community side.