Biography:

Samuel Kounev is a Professor of Computer Science holding the Chair of Software Engineering at the University of Würzburg. His research is aimed at the engineering of software for building dependable, efficient, and resilient distributed systems, including cloud-based systems, cyber-physical systems, and scientific computing applications. Research topics of the Chair span the areas of: (1) Software Architecture, focussing on the design, modeling, and simulation of distributed system architectures, (2) Systems Benchmarking, focussing on experimental analysis of performance, scalability, energy efficiency, dependability, and resilience properties, (3) Cyber Security, focussing the design, testing, and evaluation of adaptive security architectures and homomorphic computing techniques, and (4) Predictive Data Analytics, focussing on the software engineering of workflows and tools for time series forecasting, anomaly detection, and critical event prediction. Kounev’s research is inspired by the vision of self-aware computing systems, to which he has been one of the major contributors shaping its development.

Samuel Kounev studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Sofia from which he holds a MSc degree with distinction (2000). He moved to TU Darmstadt (Germany) in 2001 starting a PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in computer science, which he completed in 2005 with distinction (summa cum laude) and an award for outstanding scientific achievements by the "Vereinigung von Freunden der TU Darmstadt." He was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge (2006-2008) and Visiting Professor at UPC Barcelona (summer 2006 and 2007). In 2009, Kounev received the DFG Emmy-Noether-Career-Award (1MM EUR) for excellent young scientists, establishing his research group "Descartes" at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Since 2014, Samuel Kounev is a Full Professor holding the Chair of Software Engineering at the University of Würzburg, where he has served in various roles including Dean (2019-2021) and Vice Dean (2017-2019) of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Managing Director of the Institute of Computer Science (2016-2017), and Member of the Faculty Board (2015-2021).

Samuel Kounev is Founder and Elected Chair of the SPEC Research Group within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). This group has over 50 member organizations from around the world and serves as a platform for collaborative research efforts in the area of quantitative system evaluation and analysis, fostering the interaction between academia and industry. He has also served as Co-Founder and Steering Committee Chair of several conferences in the field, including the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) and the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS). His research has lead to over 300 publications (with an h-index of 45) and multiple scientific and industrial awards including 7 Best Paper Awards, SPEC Presidential Award for "Excellence in Research", Google Research Award, ABB Research Award, VMware Academic Research Award, etc.

Serverless Computing Revisited: Evolution, State-of-the-Art, and Performance Challenges

Abstract:

Market analysts are agreed that serverless computing has strong market potential, with projected compound annual growth rates varying between 21% and 28% through 2028 and a projected market value of $36.8 billion by that time. Although serverless computing has gained significant attention in industry and academia over the past years, there is still no consensus about its unique distinguishing characteristics and precise understanding of how these characteristics differ from classical cloud computing. For example, there is no wide agreement on whether serverless is solely a set of requirements from the cloud user’s perspective or it should also mandate specific implementation choices on the provider side, such as implementing an autoscaling mechanism to achieve elasticity. Similarly, there is no agreement on whether serverless is just the operational part, or it should also include specific programming models, interfaces, or calling protocols.

In this talk, we seek to dispel this confusion by evaluating the essential conceptual characteristics of serverless computing as a paradigm, while putting the various terms around it into perspective. We examine how the term serverless computing, and related terms, are used today. We explain the historical evolution leading to serverless computing, starting with mainframe virtualization in the 1960 through to Grid and cloud computing all the way up to today. We review existing cloud computing service models, including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, CaaS, FaaS, and BaaS, discussing how they relate to the serverless paradigm. In the second part of talk, we focus on performance challenges in serverless computing both from the user's perspective (finding the optimal size of serverless functions) as well as from the provider's perspective (ensuring predictable and fast container start times coupled with fine-granular and accurate elastic scaling mechanisms).