Make Applications FaaS-ready: Challenges and Guidelines
Richard Patsch, Karl Michael Goeschka · 2024
Functions as a Service (FaaS) represents a recent advancement in the cloud computing paradigm, offering a fine-grained deployment model that enables the execution of individual functions on cloud infrastructure. This paradigm shift promises enhanced scalability and potential cost efficiencies by leveraging the sophisticated, geographically distributed infrastructure of cloud service providers, thereby optimizing performance through minimized latency. This paper systematically explores the critical considerations for adopting FaaS, focusing on challenges such as provider selection, performance optimization, inter-function communication, and dependency management. Through a qualitative research methodology, including a comprehensive literature review and experiential insights from serverless computing, this study provides both theoretical insights and practical guidelines. The findings aim to contextualize current academic discussions and niche approaches within the broader scope of FaaS, contributing to a deeper understanding of its implications. Specific recommendations include refactoring existing applications to resolve performance bottlenecks, strategies to avoid vendor lock-in, and minimizing latency in FaaS architectures.