No More, No Less - A Formal Model for Serverless Computing

Maurizio Gabbrielli (1, 2) , Saverio Giallorenzo (3) , Ivan Lanese (1, 2) , Fabrizio Montesi (3) , Marco Peressotti (3) , Stefano Pio Zingaro (1, 2)

1 FOCUS - Foundations of Component-based Ubiquitous Systems
2 UNIBO - Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna = University of Bologna
3 SDU - University of Southern Denmark

Serverless computing, also known as Functions-as-a-Service, is a recent paradigm aimed at simplifying the programming of cloud applications. The idea is that developers design applications in terms of functions, which are then deployed on a cloud infrastructure. The infrastructure takes care of executing the functions whenever requested by remote clients, dealing automatically with distribution and scaling with respect to inbound traffic.While vendors already support a variety of programming languages for serverless computing (e.g. Go, Java, Javascript, Python), as far as we know there is no reference model yet to formally reason on this paradigm. In this paper, we propose the first core formal programming model for serverless computing, which combines ideas from both the lambda-calculus (for functions) and the pi-calculus (for communication). To illustrate our proposal, we model a real-world serverless system. Thanks to our model, we capture limitations of current vendors and formalise possible amendments.

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Maurizio Gabbrielli, Saverio Giallorenzo, Ivan Lanese, Fabrizio Montesi, Marco Peressotti, et al.. No More, No Less - A Formal Model for Serverless Computing. COORDINATION 2019 - 21th International Conference on Coordination Languages and Models, Jun 2019, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark. pp.148-157, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-22397-7_9⟩. ⟨hal-02365509⟩