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.
@article{arxiv.1812.03651,
title = {Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back},
author = {Joseph M. Hellerstein and Jose Faleiro and Joseph E. Gonzalez and Johann Schleier-Smith and Vikram Sreekanti and Alexey Tumanov and Chenggang Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.03651},
year = {2018}
}