Communications of the ACM

Home/Magazine Archive/December 2019 (Vol. 62, No. 12)/The Rise of Serverless Computing/Abstract

Contributed articles

The Rise of Serverless Computing

By Paul Castro, Vatche Ishakian, Vinod Muthusamy, Aleksander Slominski
Communications of the ACM, December 2019, Vol. 62 No. 12, Pages 44-54
10.1145/3368454
Comments

View as: Print Mobile App ACM Digital Library In the Digital Edition Share:

writing in clouds: The server is dead, long live the server — Credit: Peter Bollinger

Cloud computing in general, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in particular, have become widely accepted and adopted paradigms for computing with the offerings of virtual machines (VM) on demand. By 2020, 67% of enterprise IT infrastructure and software spending will be for cloud-based offerings.¹⁶

Key Insights

A major factor in the increased adoption of the cloud by enterprise IT was its pay-as-you-go model where a customer pays only for resources leased from the cloud provider and have the ability to get as many resources as needed with no up-front cost (elasticity).² Unfortunately, the burden of scaling was left for developers and system designers that typically used overprovisioning techniques to handle sudden surges in service requests. Studies of reported usage of cloud resources in datacenters¹⁹ show a substantial gap between the resources that cloud customers allocate and pay for (leasing VMs), and actual resource utilization (CPU, memory, and so on).

No entries found

Log in to Read the Full Article

Sign In

Sign in using your ACM Web Account username and password to access premium content if you are an ACM member, Communications subscriber or Digital Library subscriber.

Need Access?

Please select one of the options below for access to premium content and features.

Create a Web Account

If you are already an ACM member, Communications subscriber, or Digital Library subscriber, please set up a web account to access premium content on this site.

Join the ACM

Become a member to take full advantage of ACM's outstanding computing information resources, networking opportunities, and other benefits.

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM Magazine

Get full access to 50+ years of CACM content and receive the print version of the magazine monthly.

Purchase the Article

Non-members can purchase this article or a copy of the magazine in which it appears.