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Serverless Computing

What It Is, and What It Is Not?

By Samuel Kounev, Nikolas Herbst, Cristina L. Abad, Alexandru Iosup, Ian Foster, Prashant Shenoy, Omer Rana, Andrew A. Chien
Communications of the ACM, September 2023, Vol. 66 No. 9, Pages 80-92
10.1145/3587249
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array of patterned light, illustration — Credit: Siripong Jitchum

Full automation of IT infrastructure and the delivery of efficient IT operations as billed services have been long-standing goals of the computing industry since at least the 1960s. A newcomer—serverless computing—emerged in the late 2010s with characteristics claimed to be different from those of established IT services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) clouds. Even though serverless computing has gained significant attention in industry and academia over the past five years, there is still no consensus about its unique distinguishing characteristics and precise understanding of how these characteristics differ from classical cloud computing.

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What is serverless computing, and what are its implications?

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