Sixth International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC6) 2020

Part of ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference, Dec 7-11, 2020.

The workshop will take place in TU Delft, Netherlands.

Over the last four to five years, Serverless Computing (Serverless) has gained an enthusiastic following in industry as a compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications, and is enabled by the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and microservices. Many of the major cloud vendors have released serverless platforms, including Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions. Open source projects are gaining popularity in providing serverless computing as a service. In particular Kubernetes gained in popularity in enterprise and in academia. Several open source projects such as OpenFaaS and Knative aim to provide developers with serverless experience on top of Kubernetes by hiding low-level details of Kubernetes and add new capabilities such as supporting event-driven serverless cloud-native applications. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss their experiences and thoughts on future directions of serverless research.

Serverless architectures offer different tradeoffs in terms of control, cost, and flexibility compared to distributed applications built on an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) substrate. For example, a serverless architecture 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 is 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/wosc6/

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
  • Other topics related to serverless computing

Important Dates

Paper Submission: September 28, 2020 (extended)
Notification of Acceptance: October 9, 2020 (extended)
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): October 16, 2020 (extended)
Author registration deadline: TBD
Conference: December 7-11, 2020

Papers and Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research/application papers that are not being considered in another forum.

Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may not exceed six (6) single-spaced double-column pages using ACM SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page. The page limit contains all the content, including bibliography, appendix, etc.

Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page. The font size has to be set to 10pt.

Note that submissions must be double-blind: authors’ names must not appear, and authors must make a good faith attempt to anonymize their submissions.

The Middleware conference organizers will provide companion proceedings including all workshop papers, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library. This is subject to the availability of their camera-ready papers by October 16, 2020.

Authors should submit the manuscript in PDF format. All manuscripts will be reviewed and will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, rigour in analysis, quality of results, quality of presentation, and interest and relevance to the conference attendees. Papers conforming to the above guidelines can be submitted through the paper submission system powered by HotCRP (https://wosc6.hotcrp.com/).

All submitted manuscripts (following MIDDLEWARE conference requirements on formatting and page limits) will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 program committee members. Accepted papers with confirmed presentation will appear in the conference proceedings as well as in the ACM Digital Library.

Workshop co-chairs

Paul Castro, IBM Research
Pedro García López, University Rovira i Virgili
Vatche Ishakian, IBM Research
Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research
Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research

Steering Committee

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
Pedro Garcia Lopez, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain)
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)
Ali Kanso, Microsoft
Wes Lloyd, University of Washington Tacoma
Maciej Malawski, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
Pietro Michiardi, Eurecom
Lucas Nussbaum, LORIA, France
Maciej Pawlik, Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET of the University of Science and Technology in Cracow
Per Persson, Ericsson Research
Peter Pietzuch, Imperial College
Rodric Rabbah, Nimbella and Apache OpenWhisk
Eric Rozner, University of Colorado Boulder
Josef Spillner, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Rich Wolski, University of California, Santa Barbara