A Multivocal Literature Review of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) Infrastructures and Implications for Software Developers

Grogan, Jake; Mulready, Connor; McDermott, James; Urbanavicius, Martynas; Yılmaz, Murat; Abgaz, Yalemisew M.; McCarren, Andrew; MacMahon, Silvana Togneri; Garousi, Vahid; Eklund, Peter; Clarke, Paul M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-56441-4_5

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This might be particularly the case for highly distributed architectures (those with many microservices) in a serverless cloud computing environment, as software providers potentially only need to pay for services when they are executing. One example of this can be found in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) [34]. Much is changing in this space, it is not just a technology fad, fundamental economic considerations are also present.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serverless Software Engineering – and How to Get There.

McAleese

McLaughlin

Detyna

et al. 2022

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Serverless computing is on the rise but developing software to exploit this space involves a deep rethink of software architecture, deployment, and operation (perhaps also, software development processes and team structures). Central to this revolution, we find a compelling argument for distributed, services-based software architectures. But converting a large, established monolith architecture system to microservices is non-trivial and fraught with both cost and risk. For the many firms with established software systems, this architectural system conversion might be considered the first stop-off on the journey to serverless computing. In tandem, software deployment and production monitoring also require reinvention. The focus of this paper involves an examination of the advantages of microservices architectures, include techniques for migrating from monolith architectures. Through application of a Multivocal Literature Review (MLR), we find that migrating from a monolith architecture to a microservices architecture is risky and non-trivial, but that there are techniques that can be employed to support the transition. We find also that monoliths have their advantages which might be overlooked to some extent in the race to serverless computing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serverless Software Engineering – and How to Get There.

McAleese

McLaughlin

Detyna

et al. 2022

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Self Cite

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“…• Highly distributed software teams seem suited to self-organisation and distributed systems architectures as these arrangements natively promote team and work distribution. This could result in software architectural transformation for some companies, and could result in increased interest in microservices architectures [57] and serverless cloud computing provisioning models [58]. • Developers must be realistic about their role in supporting teams and companies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

To Work from Home (WFH) or Not to Work from Home? Lessons Learned by Software Engineers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Nolan

White

Soomro

et al. 2021

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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This research investigates software engineering during the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the lessons learned and predictions for future software engineering work. Four themes are explored: Remote work, Team management, Work/Life balance, and Technology/Software Engineering Methods. Our research has demonstrated that software companies will derive tangible benefits from supporting their employees during this uncertain time through ergonomic home offices, listening to their concerns, as well as encouraging breaks and hard stops to boost long term well-being and productivity. It shows that communication and collaboration tools, critical to project success, have been utilised. The hiring of new talent has been reimagined, with managers playing a vital role in the process. The insights gained are significant as they will assuage some pre-existing concerns regarding remote work, creating a new understanding of its role in the future. Looking to a post-COVID-19 future, we envision the rise of hybrid software development working arrangements, with a focus on the Working-From-Home to Not-Working-From-Home ratio -WFH : NWFH -perhaps colloquialised as Home : Not Home (HNH). For many this ratio will be neither 100:0 or 0:100, the former would lead to team breakdowns, developer isolation, difficulties onboarding and too many communication gaps, the latter would lead to disaffected employees. We identify plausible future software engineering working arrangements, noting that there are challenging times ahead for employers and employees as they navigate this HNH future, but there are benefits for both parties in getting the balance right.

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“…Furthermore, ASF is used to orchestrate Lambdas, and the impacts of factors affecting Lambdas like the startup type and allocated memory [Back and Andrikopoulos 2018;Cordingly et al 2020;Grogan et al 2020;Manner et al 2018] are also expected to propagate to the function orchestrator. Additionally, factors like payload and concurrency need to be taken into consideration too, as these parameters can vary when executing the workflow and might impact performance and cost.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to a recent market report 1 , the market size of serverless computing will reach USD 7.72 billion by the end of 2021 and grow further, making it a compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a form of serverless computing that allows executing code in response to events without the complex infrastructure associated with building and launching microservices applications [Grogan et al 2020].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the cost and performance benefits of AWS step functions using a data processing pipeline

Mathew

Andrikopoulos

Blaauw³

2021

Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing

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In traditional cloud computing, dedicated hardware is substituted by dynamically allocated, utility-oriented resources such as virtualized servers. While cloud services are following the pay-as-you-go pricing model, resources are billed based on instance allocation and not on the actual usage, leading the customers to be charged needlessly. In serverless computing, as exemplified by the Functionas-a-Service (FaaS) model where functions are the basic resources, functions are typically not allocated or charged until invoked or triggered. Functions are not applications, however, and to build compelling serverless applications they frequently need to be orchestrated with some kind of application logic. A major issue emerging by the use of orchestration is that it complicates further the already complex billing model used by FaaS providers, which in combination with the lack of granular billing and execution details offered by the providers makes the development and evaluation of serverless applications challenging.Towards shedding some light into this matter, in this work we extensively evaluate the state-of-the-art function orchestrator AWS Step Functions (ASF) with respect to its performance and cost. For this purpose we conduct a series of experiments using a serverless data processing pipeline application developed as both ASF Standard and Express workflows. Our results show that Step Functions using Express workflows are economical when running short-lived tasks with many state transitions. In contrast, Standard workflows are better suited for long-running tasks, offering in addition detailed debugging and logging information. However, even if the behavior of the orchestrated AWS Lambda functions influences both types of workflows, Step Functions realized as Express workflows get impacted the most by the phenomena affecting Lambda functions. CCS Concepts• Software and its engineering → Software performance; Cloud computing.

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A Multivocal Literature Review of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) Infrastructures and Implications for Software Developers

Cited by 13 publications

References 22 publications

Serverless Software Engineering – and How to Get There.

Serverless Software Engineering – and How to Get There.

To Work from Home (WFH) or Not to Work from Home? Lessons Learned by Software Engineers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Exploring the cost and performance benefits of AWS step functions using a data processing pipeline

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