Transpiling Applications into Optimized Serverless Orchestrations

Paper in proceeding, 2019

The serverless computing paradigm promises increased development productivity by abstracting the underlying hardware infrastructure and software runtime when building distributed cloud applications. However, composing a serverless application consisting of many tiny functions is still a cumbersome and inflexible process due to the lack of a unified source code view and strong coupling to non-standardized function-level interfaces for code and configuration. In our vision, developers can focus on writing readable source code in a logical structure, which then gets transformed into an optimized multi-function serverless orchestration. Our idea involves transpilation (i.e., source-to-source transformation) based on an optimization model (e.g., cost optimization) by dynamically deciding which set of methods will be grouped into individual deployment units. A successful implementation of our vision would enable a broader range of serverless applications and allow for dynamic deployment optimization based on monitoring runtime metrics. Further, we would expect increased developer productivity by using more familiar abstractions and facilitating clean coding practices and code reuse.