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Serverless Literature Guide

Other Applications

Serverless computing, like cloud computing, is a general-purpose technology that can be deployed in many contexts. Use cases that attracted attention early on included chatbots [1] and video encoding [2]. Serverless autoscaling also makes sense for disaster response, and several such applications have been studied [3,4,5].

Serverless robotics involves motion planning and could occur in the cloud or at the edge [6,4]. There are applications in the oil and gas industry [7] and in geospatial computing [8]. Virtual environments, including games, are another application area [9]. DevOps, which involves things like software testing, is a bursty workload that stands to benefit from serverless computing [10]. There have also been proposals to use FaaS to enable blockchain applications [11] and to execute FaaS on blockchain infrastructure [12].

Various scientific applications may benefit from serverless computing. In the high-performance computing space, high invocation rates and short deadlines could challenge existing technologies, but FaaS might provide useful benefits [13,14]. Other examples of scientific applications of FaaS include federated function serving [15], serverless linear algebra [16], and a distributed parallel analysis engine for high-energy physics [17].

  • [1]Mengting Yan, Paul Castro, Perry Cheng, and Vatche Ishakian. 2016. Building a Chatbot With Serverless Computing. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mashups of Things and APIs, 1–4.
  • [2]Sadjad Fouladi, Riad S. Wahby, Brennan Shacklett, Karthikeyan Balasubramaniam, William Zeng, Rahul Bhalerao, Anirudh Sivaraman, George Porter, and Keith Winstein. 2017. Encoding, Fast and Slow: Low-Latency Video Processing Using Thousands of Tiny Threads. In NSDI, 363–376.
  • [3]Justin Franz, Tanmayi Nagasuri, Andrew Wartman, Agnese V. Ventrella, and Flavio Esposito. 2018. Reunifying Families after a Disaster via Serverless Computing and Raspberry Pis. In 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN), IEEE, 131–132.
  • [4]Mejı́a Alexander, Diego Marcillo, Miguel Guaño, and Tatiana Gualotuña. 2020. Serverless Based Control and Monitoring for Search and Rescue Robots. In 2020 15th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI), IEEE, 1–6.
  • [5]Andrew Pawloski, Daniel Pilone, Jeff Siarto, Paul Pilone, Trevor Lang, and Colby Fayock. 2019. Improving Information and Communications in a Disaster Scenario With AWS Snowball Edge. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, IN23B–09. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/improving-information-and-communications-in-a-disaster-scenario-with-aws-snowball-edge-150731097
  • [6]Raghav Anand, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Chenggang Wu, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ken Goldberg. 2021. Serverless Multi-Query Motion Planning for Fog Robotics. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE, 7457–7463.
  • [7]Razin Farhan Hussain, Mohsen Amini Salehi, and Omid Semiari. 2019. Serverless Edge Computing for Green Oil and Gas Industry. In 2019 IEEE Green Technologies Conference (GreenTech), IEEE, 1–4.
  • [8]Sujit Bebortta, Saneev Kumar Das, Meenakshi Kandpal, Rabindra Kumar Barik, and Harishchandra Dubey. 2020. Geospatial Serverless Computing: Architectures, Tools and Future Directions. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 9, 5 (2020), 311.
  • [9]Jesse Donkervliet, Animesh Trivedi, and Alexandru Iosup. 2020. Towards Supporting Millions of Users in Modifiable Virtual Environments by Redesigning Minecraft-Like Games as Serverless Systems. In 12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud 20).
  • [10]Vitalii Ivanov and Kari Smolander. 2018. Implementation of a DevOps Pipeline for Serverless Applications. In International conference on product-focused software process improvement, Springer, 48–64.
  • [11]Huan Chen and Liang-Jie Zhang. 2018. Fbaas: Functional Blockchain as a Service. In International Conference on Blockchain, Springer, 243–250.
  • [12]Sara Ghaemi, Hamzeh Khazaei, and Petr Musilek. 2020. ChainFaaS: An Open Blockchain-Based Serverless Platform. IEEE Access 8, (2020), 131760–131778.
  • [13]Hai Duc Nguyen, Zhifei Yang, and Andrew A. Chien. 2020. Motivating High Performance Serverless Workloads. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on High Performance Serverless Computing, 25–32.
  • [14]Josef Spillner, Cristian Mateos, and David A. Monge. 2017. Faaster, Better, Cheaper: The Prospect of Serverless Scientific Computing and HPC. In Latin American High Performance Computing Conference, Springer, 154–168.
  • [15]Ryan Chard, Yadu Babuji, Zhuozhao Li, Tyler Skluzacek, Anna Woodard, Ben Blaiszik, Ian Foster, and Kyle Chard. 2020. FuncX: A Federated Function Serving Fabric for Science. In Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, 65–76.
  • [16]Vaishaal Shankar, Karl Krauth, Kailas Vodrahalli, Qifan Pu, Benjamin Recht, Ion Stoica, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Eric Jonas, and Shivaram Venkataraman. 2020. Serverless Linear Algebra. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, 281–295.
  • [17]Jacek Kuśnierz, Maciej Malawski, Vincenzo Eduardo Padulano, Enric Tejedor Saavedra, and Pedro Alonso-Jorda. 2020. Distributed Parallel Analysis Engine for High Energy Physics Using AWS Lambda. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on High Performance Serverless Computing, 13–16.