Serverless Computing as the Next Phase of Cloud

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 What Serverless Computing Is and Should Become: The Next Phase of Cloud Computing

By Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Anurag Khandelwal, Joao Carreira, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Raluca Ada Popa, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, David A. Patterson

Communications of the ACM, May 2021, Vol. 64 No. 5, Pages 76-84  10.1145/3406011

In 2010, some of us co-authored a Communications article that helped explain the relatively new phenomenon of cloud computing.4 We said that cloud computing provided the illusion of infinitely scalable remote servers without charging a premium for scale, as renting 1,000 servers for one hour costs the same as renting one server for 1,000 hours, and that economies of scale for the cloud provider allowed it to be surprisingly inexpensive. We listed challenges to cloud computing, and then predicted that most would be overcome so the industry would increasingly shift from computing inside local data centers to "the cloud," which has indeed happened. Today two-thirds of enterprise information technology spending for infrastructure and software is based in the cloud.8

We are revisiting cloud computing a decade later to explain its emerging second phase, which we believe will further accelerate the shift to the cloud. The first phase mainly simplified system administration by making it easier to configure and manage computing infrastructure, primarily through the use of virtual servers and networks carved out from massive multi-tenant data centers. This second phase hides the servers by providing programming abstractions for application builders that simplify cloud development, making cloud software easier to write. Stated briefly, the target of the first phase was system administrators and the second is programmers. This change requires cloud providers to take over many of the operational responsibilities needed to run applications well.

To emphasize the change of focus from servers to applications, this new phase has become known as serverless computing, although remote servers are still the invisible bedrock that powers it. In this article, we call the traditional first phase serverful computing. .... "