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A Survey of Actor-Like Programming Models for Serverless Computing

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Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14360))

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Abstract

Serverless computing promises to significantly simplify cloud computing by providing Functions-as-a-Service where invocations of functions, triggered by events, are automatically scheduled for execution on compute nodes. Notably, the serverless computing model does not require the manual provisioning of virtual machines; instead, FaaS enables load-based billing and auto-scaling according to the workload, reducing costs and making scheduling more efficient. While early serverless programming models only supported stateless functions and severely restricted program composition, recently proposed systems offer greater flexibility by adopting ideas from actor and dataflow programming. This paper presents a survey of actor-like programming abstractions for stateful serverless computing, and provides a characterization of their properties and highlights their origin.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by Digital Futures, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (under Grant No.: BD15-0006), Horizon Europe (SovereignEdge.Cognit under Grant No.: 101092711), as well as RISE AI.

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  1. Digital Futures and EECS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jonas Spenger, Paris Carbone & Philipp Haller

  2. Computer Systems, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jonas Spenger & Paris Carbone

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    Frank de Boer

  2. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Ferruccio Damiani

  3. Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

    Reiner Hähnle

  4. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Einar Broch Johnsen

  5. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

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Spenger, J., Carbone, P., Haller, P. (2024). A Survey of Actor-Like Programming Models for Serverless Computing. In: de Boer, F., Damiani, F., Hähnle, R., Broch Johnsen, E., Kamburjan, E. (eds) Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14360. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_5

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