research-article

An empirical study on challenges of application development in serverless computing

Authors:

Xuanzhe LiuAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2021: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 416 - 428

https://doi.org/10.1145/3468264.3468558

Published: 18 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm for cloud computing, gaining traction in a wide range of applications such as video processing and machine learning. This new paradigm allows developers to focus on the development of the logic of serverless computing based applications (abbreviated as serverless-based applications) in the granularity of function, thereby freeing developers from tedious and error-prone infrastructure management. Meanwhile, it also introduces new challenges on the design, implementation, and deployment of serverless-based applications, and current serverless computing platforms are far away from satisfactory. However, to the best of our knowledge, these challenges have not been well studied. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive study on understanding the challenges in developing serverless-based applications from the developers’ perspective. We mine and analyze 22,731 relevant questions from Stack Overflow (a popular Q&A website for developers), and show the increasing popularity trend and the high difficulty level of serverless computing for developers. Through manual inspection of 619 sampled questions, we construct a taxonomy of challenges that developers encounter, and report a series of findings and actionable implications. Stakeholders including application developers, researchers, and cloud providers can leverage these findings and implications to better understand and further explore the serverless computing paradigm.

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ESEC/FSE 2021: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2021

1690 pages

ISBN:9781450385626

DOI:10.1145/3468264

General Chairs:
Diomidis Spinellis
Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
,
Georgios Gousios
Facebook, Netherlands / Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Program Chairs:
Marsha Chechik
University of Toronto, Canada
,
Massimiliano Di Penta
University of Sannio, Italy

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 August 2021

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Research-article

Funding Sources

R&D Projects in Key Areas of Guangdong Province
PKU-Baidu Fund Project
Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program
National Natural Science Foundation of China

Conference

ESEC/FSE '21

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE '21: 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 23 - 28, 2021

Athens, Greece

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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