A Preliminary Review of Enterprise Serverless Cloud Computing (Function-as-a-Service) Platforms

In line with cloud computing emergence as the dominant enterprise computing paradigm, our conceptualization of the cloud computing reference architecture and service construction has also evolved. For example, to address the need for cost reduction and rapid provisioning, virtualization has moved beyond hardware to containers. More recently, serverless computing or Function-as-a-Service has been presented as a means to introduce further cost-efficiencies, reduce configuration and management overheads, and rapidly increase an application's ability to speed up, scale up and scale down in the cloud. The potential of this new computation model is reflected in the introduction of serverless computing platforms by the main hyperscale cloud service providers. This paper provides an overview and multi-level feature analysis of seven enterprise serverless computing platforms. It reviews extant research on these platforms and identifies the emergence of AWS Lambda as a de facto base platform for research on enterprise serverless cloud computing. The paper concludes with a summary of avenues for further research.