CFP: Third International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC) 2018

In conjunction with IEEE CLOUD 2018 affiliated with 2018 IEEE World Congress on Services (IEEE SERVICES 2018)

The workshop will take place in San Francisco, CA, USA.

Serverless Computing (Serverless) is emerging as a new and compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications, and is enabled by the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and micro services. Many of the major cloud vendors, have released serverless platforms within the last two years, including Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions. There is, however, little attention from the research community. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss their experiences and thoughts on future directions.

Serverless architectures offer different tradeoffs in terms of control, cost, and flexibility. For example, this requires developers to more carefully consider the resources used by their code (time to execute, memory used, etc.) when modularizing their applications. This is in contrast to concerns around latency, scalability, and elasticity, which is where significant development effort has traditionally been spent when building cloud services. In addition, tools and techniques to monitor and debug applications aren't applicable in serverless architectures, and new approaches are needed. As well, test and development pipelines may need to be adapted. Another decision that developers face are the appropriateness of the serverless ecosystem to their application requirements. A rich ecosystem of services built into the platform is typically easier to compose and would offer better performance. However, composing external services may be unavoidable, and in such cases, many of the benefits of serverless disappear, including performance and availability guarantees. This presents an important research challenge, and it is not clear how existing results and best practices, such as workflow composition research, can be applied to composition in a serverless environment.

Authors are invited to submit research papers, experience papers, demonstrations, or position papers.

The latest version of this CFP is available at http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc3/

Topics

This workshop solicits papers from both academia and industry on the state of practice and state of the art in serverless computing. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Infrastructure and network optimizations for serverless applications
  • Debugging serverless applications
  • Programming models
  • Use cases, experiences
  • Benchmarks
  • Cost models, pricing models, and economics of serverless
  • DevOps (customer side)
  • Other topics related to serverless computing

Important Dates

Paper Submission: March 21, 2018 (Final)
Notification of Acceptance: April 18, 2018 (Extended)
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript Due: May 9, 2018 (Extended)

Papers and Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research/application papers that are not being considered in another forum.

All submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 program committee members. Accepted papers (from both tracks and workshops) with confirmed presentation will appear in the conference proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

Submitted papers will be limited to 8 (IEEE Proceedings style) pages and REQUIRED to be formatted using the IEEE Proceedings template. Submitted Work-in-Progress Papers will be limited to 4 (IEEE Proceedings style) pages. Unformatted papers and papers beyond the page limit may not be reviewed. Electronic submission of manuscripts (in PDF format) is required. Please download the paper template in WORD or LaTeX.

Manuscripts should be submitted to the IEEE CLOUD 2018 Serverless Workshop Paper Submission/Review System (new link) powered by EasyChair.org. Full-length papers should be submitted to the Research Track; and short papers be submitted to the Work-in-Progress Track. When submitting a full-length paper, one should select serverless workshop (single choice).

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieeecloud2018

All papers will be reviewed by the same program committee to ensure quality and consistency.

For a paper submitted the Workshop Chair(s) will decide whether the paper be accepted or recommend to the Work-in-Progress Track for further consideration.

Review policy

IEEE Policy and professional ethics require that referees treat the contents of papers under review as privileged information not to be disclosed to others before publication. It is expected that no one with access to a paper under review will make any inappropriate use of the special knowledge, which that access provides. Contents of abstracts submitted to conference program committees should be regarded as privileged as well, and handled in the same manner. The Conference Publications Chair shall ensure that referees adhere to this practice.

Organizers of IEEE conferences are expected to provide an appropriate forum for the oral presentation and discussion of all accepted papers. An author, in offering a paper for presentation at an IEEE conference, or accepting an invitation to present a paper, is expected to be present at the meeting to deliver the paper. In the event that circumstances unknown at the time of submission of a paper preclude its presentation by an author, the program chair should be informed on time, and appropriate substitute arrangements should be made. In some cases it may help reduce no-shows for the Conference to require advance registration together with the submission of the final manuscript.

Workshop co-chairs

Paul Castro, IBM Research
Vatche Ishakian, Bentley University
Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research
Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research

Steering Committee (tentative)

Roger Barga, Amazon Web Services
Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)

Program Committee (tentative)

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Azer Bestavros, Boston University
Flavio Esposito, Saint Louis University
Rodrigo Fonseca, Brown University
Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)
Tyler Harter, GSL, Microsoft.
Pietro Michiardi, Eurecom
Peter Pietzuch, Imperial College
Rodric Rabbah, IBM Research
Rich Wolski, University of California, Santa Barbara