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Serverless Literature Guide

System Abstractions

Even popular serverless abstractions such as FaaS are not standardized across cloud providers. SPEC-RG seeks to address this and proposes a reference architecture for FaaS [1]. Adopting a broad view of serverless computing also invites proposals for standardized abstractions of storage and communication, which round out the core features of an operating system. Pemberton et al. [2] outline this need, whereas ServerlessOS [3] offers a concrete proposal. LegoOS [4] provides operating system abstractions for hardware disaggregation. Though not positioned as serverless, it addresses the same core concerns.

  • [1]Erwin Van Eyk, Johannes Grohmann, Simon Eismann, André Bauer, Laurens Versluis, Lucian Toader, Norbert Schmitt, Nikolas Herbst, Cristina L. Abad, and Alexandru Iosup. 2019. The SPEC-RG Reference Architecture for FaaS: From Microservices and Containers to Serverless Platforms. IEEE Internet Computing 23, 6 (2019), 7–18.
  • [2]Nathan Pemberton, Johann Schleier-Smith, and Joseph E. Gonzalez. 2021. The RESTless Cloud. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 49–57.
  • [3]Zaid Al-Ali, Sepideh Goodarzy, Ethan Hunter, Sangtae Ha, Richard Han, Eric Keller, and Eric Rozner. 2018. Making Serverless Computing More Serverless. In 2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), IEEE, 456–459.
  • [4]Yizhou Shan, Yutong Huang, Yilun Chen, and Yiying Zhang. 2018. LegoOS: A disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation. In 13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 18), 69–87.