A Multivocal Literature Survey of Patterns for Serverless work (work-as-a-Service)

Abstract

Serverless can be defined as one of the new technologies which allows businesses to decrease the overhead of scaling, managing and provisioning organization in general. Serverless is becoming more popular as businesses migrate current applications to such novel paradigm. Patterns for managing and composing the functions of serverless were suggested by various practitioners. Yet, a few of such patterns provide multiple solutions to the same problem, making it difficult to choose the best solution for each one of the problems.  The objective of this work is to classify the patterns and report potential issues and benefits, so that practitioners can better understand them.  This study used a Multi-vocal Literature Review (MLR) approach, scouring peer-reviewed as well as grey literature for patterns (common solutions to common problems), as well as issues and benefits.  This work identified 32 patterns among 24 works, categorizing them as aggregation, orchestration, availability, event management, authorization and communication.  Even in the case where a small number of the patterns suggested distinctive solutions to comparable issues, practitioners have suggested a set of the rather consistent patterns. A few patterns arose in response to the limitations of serverless, whereas others arose in response to more traditional technical issues (for example, publisher/subscriber).