An empirical study on challenges of application development in serverless computing

Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm for cloud computing, gaining traction in a wide range of applications such as video processing and machine learning. This new paradigm allows developers to focus on the development of the logic of serverless computing based applications (abbreviated as serverless-based applications) in the granularity of function, thereby freeing developers from tedious and error-prone infrastructure management. Meanwhile, it also introduces new challenges on the design, implementation, and deployment of serverless-based applications, and current serverless computing platforms are far away from satisfactory. However, to the best of our knowledge, these challenges have not been well studied. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive study on understanding the challenges in developing serverless-based applications from the developers’ perspective. We mine and analyze 22,731 relevant questions from Stack Overflow (a popular Q&A website for developers), and show the increasing popularity trend and the high difficulty level of serverless computing for developers. Through manual inspection of 619 sampled questions, we construct a taxonomy of challenges that developers encounter, and report a series of findings and actionable implications. Stakeholders including application developers, researchers, and cloud providers can leverage these findings and implications to better understand and further explore the serverless computing paradigm.