Seventh International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC7)

Part of [1]ACM/IFIP Middleware 2021.

The workshop will be held virtually this year.

Over the last seven 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.

Recently, 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. Auto-scalable Multi-tenant Kubernetes
deployments like Google Cloud Run or IBM Code Engine also overcome
previous limitations of Serverless Functions like duration, networking,
and higher granularity (more vCPUs).

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.

As this year the workshop is virtual and we are looking not only for
research papers, experience papers, demonstrations, or position papers
but also for live presentations of ongoing work, demonstrations, and
anything else that may be interesting to workshop audience.

The latest version of this CFP is available at
[2]http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc7/

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 26, 2021 (extended)
Notification of Acceptance: October 7, 2021
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): October 10, 2021
Non-paper submissions (demos and other proposals): November 10, 2021
Author registration deadline: TBD
Conference: December 6-10, 2021

Papers and Submissions

Papers 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 [3]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 10, 2021.

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
([4]https://wosc7.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.

Other submissions

Authors are invited to submit proposals for demos and other
presentations that are not papers.

Proposals must be submitted as short abstracts (not longer than one
page) in PDF format using the paper submission system HotCRP
([5]https://wosc7.hotcrp.com/).

Accepted presentations will not be part of the conference proceedings
but will be part of the workshop agenda with dedicated time for live
presentation (with video backup), questions etc.

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
Tyler R. Caraza-Harter, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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)
Volker Hilt, Bell Labs (Nokia)
Alexandru Iosup, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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
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

References

1. http://2021.middleware-conference.org/
2. http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc7/
3. https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
4. https://wosc7.hotcrp.com/
5. https://wosc7.hotcrp.com/