The State of FaaS: An analysis of public Functions-as-a-Service providers
Nnamdi Ekwe-Ekwe, Lucas Amos
TL;DR
This paper addresses the gap in understanding the state of public Functions-as-a-Service by conducting a detailed cross-provider review of ten publicly available FaaS platforms beyond the well-studied AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. It uses a twofold methodology combining public cloud offerings and practitioner/industry sources to assemble a diverse set of ten providers, classified as generalised or specialised. The authors analyze each platform across history, languages, invocation types, resource configurations, regions, and pricing, delivering key observations on maturity, edge deployment, language support, and pricing diversity. The findings offer practitioners and researchers a consolidated view of the current FaaS landscape, outline concrete differences that influence workload placement, and motivate future empirical work to deepen understanding of cross-provider performance and cost.
Abstract
Serverless computing is a growing and maturing field that is the focus of much research, industry interest and adoption. Previous works exploring Functions-as-a-Service providers have focused primarily on the most well known providers AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions without exploring other providers in similar detail. In this work, we conduct the first detailed review of ten currently publicly available FaaS platforms exploring everything from their history, to their features and pricing to where they sit within the overall public FaaS landscape, before making a number of observations as to the state of the FaaS.