Serverless Computing Architectures and Applications
Summary
Serverless computing architectures decouple application logic from server management by enabling developers to deploy discrete, event-driven functions that automatically scale in response to demand. This paradigm, often realised as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), offers fine-grained resource allocation, pay-per-use billing and “scale-to-zero” capabilities, eliminating idle resource costs. Modern serverless systems support a broad array of applications including web back-ends, real-time data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) services and machine-learning inference pipelines. Emerging research extends serverless to edge and heterogeneous environments, integrates orchestration frameworks for complex workflows and explores hybrid cloud–edge continuum deployments. Key advantages include reduced operational burden, rapid provisioning and elastic performance, but challenges persist around cold-start latency, state management, security and reproducibility of experiments. Current investigations address taxonomy of data pipeline approaches, adaptive orchestration mechanisms, energy-efficient scheduling and seamless integration with emerging accelerator hardware. The global significance of serverless computing lies in democratising access to scalable computing, fostering rapid innovation in domains such as public health monitoring, intelligent transportation and geospatial analytics, and optimising resource usage in large-scale scientific workflows.
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Recent studies have proposed a comprehensive taxonomy of serverless data-pipeline approaches, categorising heuristic-based, machine-learning-based and framework-based methods. This classification illuminates the strengths and limitations of existing tools for workflow orchestration, data transformation and performance monitoring, and highlights open challenges in fault tolerance, real-time processing and function state management.
An extensive survey of over 275 articles has mapped the evolution of serverless computing, detailing its core concepts, platform characteristics and typical usage scenarios. The work identifies prevailing research questions around latency, scalability and cost-effectiveness, and offers a systematic overview of future directions to strengthen adoption across academia and industry.
An extension to traditional FaaS platforms introduces a Function Delivery Network that spans heterogeneous clusters and target platforms. By routing functions to the most suitable environment based on service-level objectives and energy-efficiency metrics, this approach demonstrates significant reductions in energy consumption while respecting performance requirements, thereby enabling dynamic resource provisioning across edge and cloud infrastructures.
Serverless Computing Architectures and Applications publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in serverless computing architectures and applications across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Serverless computing: A cloud paradigm in which the infrastructure and scaling are managed by the provider, allowing code to run in response to events without server provisioning.
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS): A category of serverless computing in which individual functions are executed on demand and charged by execution time.
Cold start: The latency incurred when a serverless platform initialises a new execution environment before running a function.
Edge computing: Deployment of compute resources closer to data sources or end-users to reduce latency and bandwidth usage.
Workflow orchestration: The coordination and scheduling of interdependent functions or tasks to execute complex, multi-step processes.
Autoscaling: Automatic adjustment of computational resources or function instances based on real-time workload metrics.
References
- Data pipeline approaches in serverless computing: a taxonomy, review, and research trends. Journal of Big Data (2024).
- Survey on serverless computing. Journal of Cloud Computing (2021).
- Function delivery network: Extending serverless computing for heterogeneous platforms. Software Practice and Experience (2021).
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