Institute Hosts 8/8 Colloquium on Serverless Computing

Tuesday, August 8, 2017
3:00pm – 4:00pm
Hariri Institute for Computing, Seminar Room
111 Cummington Mall; Boston, MA

The Institute will host a special colloquium in which Vatche Ishakian will present his work on Serverless Computing. Ishakian will identify key characteristics and use cases as well as describe technical challenges and open problems. In particular, his work focuses on how serverless computing is emerging as a new and compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications, largely due to the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and microservices. Ishakian reviews this paradigm from the perspective of a cloud customer as well as from the perspective of a cloud provider. His research interests include cloud computing, resource management, application-level scheduling, network optimization and economics, data placement, and network architecture.

Vatche Ishakian
Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems, Bentley University
Visiting Fellow, Hariri Institute for Computing

Serverless Computing (Function as a Service)

Abstract: Serverless Computing (Function as a Service) is emerging as a new and compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications, largely due to the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and microservices. From the perspective of a cloud customer, this paradigm shift presents both an opportunity and a risk. On the one hand, it lowers the cost of deploying cloud code by charging for execution time rather than resource allocation; and it is a platform for rapidly deploying small pieces of cloud native code that responds to events. On the other hand, deploying such applications in a serverless platform is challenging and requires relinquishing to the platform design decisions that concern, among other things, quality-of-service (QoS) monitoring, scaling, and fault-tolerance. From the perspective of a cloud provider, serverless computing provides an additional opportunity to control the entire development stack, reduce operational costs by efficient optimization and management of cloud resources, and enabling a serverless ecosystem that encourages the deployment of additional cloud services. Serverless platforms promise new capabilities that make writing scalable microservices easier and cost effective, positioning themselves as the next step in the evolution of cloud computing architectures. Most of the prominent cloud computing providers including Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Google have recently released serverless computing capabilities. In this work, I will present serverless computing, and identify key characteristics and use cases, and describe technical challenges and open problems.

About the Speaker: Vatche Ishakian is an assistant professor of computer information systems at Bentley University. Previously, he was a  researcher in the  Service Integration and Analytics Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include cloud computing, resource management, application-level scheduling, network optimization and economics, data placement, and network architecture. He was also a member of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering at Boston University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Boston University and a M.S. from the Lebanese American University (LAU) of Lebanon.