Serverless Computing and the Emergence of Function-as-a-Service

Serverless computing is one of the most recent additions to the long list of services provided by cloud computing. Improving upon the attributes of scalability, affordability, and granularity present in earlier services offered by cloud computing, serverless computing is the next major development. Function as a Service has further modularized applications and enabled the individual execution of functions using triggers which has led to reduced costs, improved scaling of applications and almost no configuration expenses. Several cloud computing providers have developed their serverless computing services, each having its advantages and disadvantages. This paper aims to describe the need for serverless computing, its working, its economics, applications, its pros and cons in the current state, and the developments over existing technologies. Various serverless computing providers and their services have also been compared and studied.