Beyond Cloud: Serverless Functions in the Compute Continuum

Abstract Serverless computing and, in particular, the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm are increasingly popular, promising seamless scalability, simplified operations and flexible pricing. As more and more applications aim to benefit from near-user computation, there is increasing interest in deploying and running FaaS systems in the emerging edge-to-cloud compute continuum of computational resources. However, this new environment forces FaaS systems, originally developed with cloud in mind, to deal with limited resource availability, high hardware heterogeneity, and geographical distributions. In this paper, we discuss the key challenges for deployment and execution of serverless functions in the compute continuum, reviewing recent research contributions on the topic. We also discuss the key issues that remain unsolved and highlight a research opportunities to make FaaS adoption easier and more efficient far from cloud data centers.