Article in Proceedings INPROC-2019-38

BibliographyYussupov, Vladimir; Breitenbücher, Uwe; Leymann, Frank; Müller, Christian: Facing the Unplanned Migration of Serverless Applications: A Study on Portability Problems, Solutions, and Dead Ends.
In: ACM (ed.): Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2019).
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
pp. 273-283, english.
ACM, December 2019.
DOI: 10.1145/3344341.3368813.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CR-SchemaD.2.0 (Software Engineering General)
D.2.11 (Software Engineering Software Architectures)
D.2.12 (Software Engineering Interoperability)
KeywordsServerless; Function-as-a-Service; FaaS; Portability; Migration
Abstract

Serverless computing focuses on developing cloud applications that comprise components fully managed by providers. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) service model is often associated with the term serverless as it allows developing entire applications by composing provider-managed, event-driven code snippets. However, such reduced control over the infrastructure and tight-coupling with provider's services amplify the various lock-in problems. In this work, we explore the challenges of migrating serverless, FaaS-based applications across cloud providers. To achieve this, we conduct an experiment in which we implement four prevalent yet intentionally simple serverless use cases and manually migrate them across three popular commercial cloud providers. The results show that even when migrating simple use cases, developers encounter multiple aspects of a lock-in problem. Moreover, we present a categorization of the problems and discuss the feasibility of possible solutions.

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UCC 2019
ContactVladimir Yussupov yussupov@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Project(s)RADON
Entry dateJanuary 16, 2020
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