FaaS (Function as a Service)

In this paper, we provide an analysis of Function as a Service (FaaS) infrastructures. In the past few years, FaaS has gained significant popularity and became a go-to choice for deploying cloud applications and micro-services. FaaS with its unique ‘pay as you go’ pricing model and key performance benefits over other cloud services, offers an easy and intuitive programming model to build cloud applications. , a developer focuses on writing the code of the application while infrastructure management is left to the cloud provider who is responsible for the underlying resources, security, isolation, and scaling of the application. FaaS is an important, emerging category of cloud computing, which requires that software applications are designed and deployed using distributed, highly-decoupled service-based architectures, one example of which is the microservices architecture paradigm. FaaS is associated with on-demand functionality and allows developers to build applications without the overhead associated with server management. As such, FaaS is a type of serverless provisioning model wherein a provider dynamically manages and allocates machine resources, with the developers deploying source code into a production environment. This research provides an analysis of scalability, cost, execution times, integration support, and the constraints associated with FaaS services provided by several vendors: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. We discuss the implications of the findings for software developers.