Serverless Computing – Cloud Computing without Servers

Friday - October 6 2023, 00:03 UTC - 1 year ago

Serverless Computing is a new generation of cloud services that is based on the paradigm of "serverless computing", which is an active research topic at the Institute for Computer Science in Würzburg. It is a shift towards the cloud provider taking over responsibility for server management, so users can focus 100% on programming. A recent article in Communications of the ACM deals with the history, status and potential of serverless computing.

A new generation of cloud services is on the rise. It is based on the paradigm of "serverless computing," which is an active research topic at the Institute for Computer Science in Würzburg.In cloud computing, commercial providers make computing resources available on demand to their customers over the Internet. This service is partly offered "serverless," that is, without servers. How can that work? Computing resources without a server, isn't that like a restaurant without a kitchen? .

"The term is misleading," says computer science Professor Samuel Kounev from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Because even serverless cloud services don't get by without servers.

In classical cloud computing, for example, a web shop rents computing resources from a cloud provider in the form of virtual machines (VMs). However, the shop itself remains responsible for the management of "its" servers, that is, the VMs. It has to take care of security aspects as well as the avoidance of overload situations or the recovery from system failures.

The situation is different with serverless computing. Here, the cloud provider takes over responsibility for the complete server management. The cloud users can no longer even access the server, it remains hidden from them—hence the term "serverless." .

"The basic idea of serverless computing has been around since the beginning of cloud computing. However, it has not become widely accepted," explains Samuel Kounev, who heads the JMU Chair of Computer Science II (Software Engineering). But a shift can currently be observed in the industry and in science, the focus is increasingly moving towards serverless computing.

A recent article in Communications of the ACM deals with the history, status and potential of serverless computing. Among the authors are Samuel Kounev and Dr. Nikolas Herbst, who heads the JMU research group "Data Analytics Clouds." Credit: Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg .

Experts define serverless computing inconsistently .

The origins of the research article lie two years back. In 2021, around 50 international experts in serverless computing met at a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl—Leibniz Center for Informatics.

"We discussed the most important developments and research questions there and found out that many of us define serverless computing differently and that contradictions sometimes arise," Kounev recounts. This is not unusual in science, he says, when a paradigm shift emerges.

In order to create clarity, a small group of researchers got together. Together, they tried to define serverless computing precisely after the seminar. Exactly this circle of people has now published the article in the renowned CACM magazine; it also includes Ian Foster, a prominent pioneer of cloud computing from the U.S.

Two key principles defined .

The team has defined two principles that characterize serverless computing. "NoOps" is the first, which stands for "no operations." This means, as described above, that the technical server management, including the hardware and software layers, is completely in the responsibility of the cloud provider.

The second pinciple is "Full-Focus-Programming," which emphasizes that programmers should be able to exercise control over the cloud service and adapt it to their demands without any configuration tasks. In other words, serverless computing should enable users to focus 100 percent on programming and not think of system configurations.