Software Engineering for Serverless Computing

Abstract: Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm that has been applied to various domains, including machine learning, scientific computing, video processing, etc. To develop serverless computing-based software applications (a.k.a., serverless applications), developers follow the new cloud-based software architecture, where they develop event-driven applications without the need for complex and error-prone server management. The great demand for developing serverless applications poses unique challenges to software developers. However, Software Engineering (SE) has not yet wholeheartedly tackled these challenges. In this paper, we outline a vision for how SE can facilitate the development of serverless applications and call for actions by the SE research community to reify this vision. Specifically, we discuss possible directions in which researchers and cloud providers can facilitate serverless computing from the SE perspective, including configuration management, data security, application migration, performance, testing and debugging, etc.