Call for Papers
FGCS Special Issue on:
Serverless Computing for Next-generation Application Development

Serverless computing is a new paradigm for developing, deploying, and operating cloud applications. It is a step towards greater abstraction of virtualization technology, from bare metal to virtual machines, containers, and now Functions as a Service (FaaS). Serverless computing reduces complexity for the user by outsourcing infrastructure and operational measures to the service provider, offering high agility and lower cost in application development without the need for operational expertise. Functions in Serverless computing are typically event-driven and can be triggered by various types of events, such as a change in a data source, an HTTP request, a message being added to a queue, or a record being inserted in a database. With Serverless, users only pay for the resources they consume, rather than having to provision and pay for resources in advance.

Despite its commercial success and benefits, there are many open research challenges in serverless computing, such as handling state for ephemeral functions, cold start, function composition, debugging and monitoring, efficient auto-scaling and resource management, and security and compliance. Other outstanding issues include utilizing serverless on heterogeneous hardware/software and throughout the edge-to-cloud continuum or over dynamic networks. While serverless has been successfully applied to a wide range of application domains such as web and mobile backends, IoT, and data processing, it is anticipated to help scale HPC and High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), facilitate the adoption of AI/ML/DL techniques and be used for Big Data processing, among others. The development of these applications brings new challenges specific to these domains that necessitate the advancement of serverless technology and prompt attention. 

This special issue aims to promote high-quality research on recent serverless computing advances to support existing and emerging applications and to inspire related research efforts. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Serverless/FaaS computing patterns and composition languages

• Function-as-a-service (FaaS) chaining

• Serverless frameworks, platforms, and tools

• Serverless computing services and FaaS application development methods

• Methods for distributed serverless computing

• Serverless/FaaS computing in edge, fog, and cloud architectures

• Autoscaling techniques for serverless/FaaS computing platforms

• Resource scheduling and management for serverless computing platforms

• Networking Protocols and software-defined networking techniques for serverless/FaaS

• Serverless computing in wireless domains such as Adhoc and Mobile networks, 5G/6G/beyond, etc

• In-Network Serverless Computing

• Serverless and FaaS for Big data applications

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with/for serverless computing

• Benchmarking suite and tools for performance evaluation of serverless applications

• Performance evaluation of serverless computing frameworks

• Performance models for serverless execution models

• Modeling, analysis, and simulation of serverless computing

• Prototypes and real-life experiments involving serverless computing

• Existing and emerging serverless applications with high societal impact

• Viewpoints, visions, survey papers and community views on serverless computing

• Submission portal opens: January 30, 2023

• Deadline for paper submission (extended dealine): June 30, 2023 July 16, 2023.

• Latest acceptance deadline for all papers: November 1, 2023

By submitting your paper as early as possible, you will receive a faster decision on your submission as we begin processing it immediately upon receipt of your manuscript.