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A Multivocal Literature Review of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) Infrastructures and Implications for Software Developers

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Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1251))

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Abstract

In this paper, we provide a multivocal literature review of Function as a Service (FaaS) infrastructures. FaaS is an important, emerging category of cloud computing, which requires that software applications are designed and deployed using distributed, highly-decoupled service-based architectures, one example of which is the microservices architecture paradigm. FaaS is associated with on-demand functionality and allows developers to build applications without the overhead associated with server management. As such, FaaS is a type of serverless provisioning model wherein a provider dynamically manages and allocates machine resources, with the developers deploying source code into a production environment. This research provides an analysis of scalability, cost, execution times, integration support, and the constraints associated with FaaS services provided by several vendors: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. We discuss the implications of the findings for software developers.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094 and co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Jake Grogan, Connor Mulready, James McDermott, Martynas Urbanavicius, Murat Yilmaz, Yalemisew Abgaz, Andrew McCarren, Silvana Togneri MacMahon & Paul Clarke

  2. Lero – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, Limerick, Ireland

    Murat Yilmaz, Silvana Togneri MacMahon & Paul Clarke

  3. School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queens University, Belfast, UK

    Vahid Garousi

  4. fourTheorem Limited, Cork, Ireland

    Peter Elger

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Correspondence to Paul Clarke .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Murat Yilmaz

  2. University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Jörg Niemann

  3. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Paul Clarke

  4. I.S.C.N. GesmbH, Graz, Steiermark, Austria

    Richard Messnarz

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Grogan, J. et al. (2020). A Multivocal Literature Review of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) Infrastructures and Implications for Software Developers. In: Yilmaz, M., Niemann, J., Clarke, P., Messnarz, R. (eds) Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1251. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56441-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56441-4_5

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