9th International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC9)

Part of [1]ACM/IFIP Middleware 2023.

WoSC9 will be hybrid this year with both virtual and on-location
formats. Please note that while hybrid formats will be supported for
workshops, the Middleware 2023 steering committee wants the main
conference to be held in in-person only. Prospective attendees of the
workshop should keep this in mind if they plan to attend both WoSC9 and
Middleware 2023.

Over the last nine 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 on the cloud is a somewhat mature research area with many
conferences accepting papers on this topic. In the spirit of having
this workshop serve as a venue for future and exploratory research
directions, we will be evolving the workshop to include hybrid cloud
environments, as well as edge and IoT devices. These next-gen computing
architectures are becoming more common but have little support from
serverless platforms and bring new challenges to old concerns such as
resource optimization, scaling, cost, monitoring, and ease of use. The
serverless experience becomes an important topic for emerging topics
such as DevOps and [2]Platform Engineering in industry and will be
critical to the success of next-gen computing.

Building on the recent advances in generative AI, including Large
Language Models (LLMs) and other types of Foundations Models (FMs), the
workshop also plans to explore the use of hybrid serverless platforms
to fine-tune, serve, and manage the lifecycle of LLMs with a focus on
aspects such as use cases, resource allocations, optimizations, and
using AI to improve serverless experience.

This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss
their experiences and thoughts on future directions of serverless
research.

As this year the workshop is hybrid 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
[3]http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc9/

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
* Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud for serverless and next-gen computing
like Edge, Fog, IoT, etc.
* Serverless and next-gen computing in Industry such as Platform
Engineering and Internal Developer Platforms and other areas
* Next-gen data platform and how to use it with serverless-like
approaches
* AI assist and generative LLMs such as ChatGPT applied to serverless
experience
* Low-code and no-code - new programming abstractions
* Developer productivity: from local code to observability and
maintenance
* Debugging serverless applications
* Programming models
* Use cases, experiences
* Benchmarks
* Cost models, pricing models, and economics of serverless
* DevOps
* Confidential computing
* Sustainable computing
* Granular computing,
* Super-lightweight containers Web Assembly
* Swarm intelligence
* Other topics related to serverless computing

Important Dates

Paper Submission: October 2, 2023 (AOE)
Notification of Acceptance: October 10, 2023
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): October 20, 2023
Non-paper submissions (demos and other proposals): November 10, 2023
Author registration deadline: TBD
Conference: December 11-15, 2023

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 [4]ACM template page. The font
size has to be set to 10pt.

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 20, 2023.

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
([5]https://wosc2023.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
([6]https://wosc2023.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
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
Višnja Križanović, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek
Samuel Kounev, University of Wuerzburg
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://2023.middleware-conference.org/
2. https://platformengineering.org/
3. http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc9/
4. https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
5. https://wosc2023.hotcrp.com/
6. https://wosc2023.hotcrp.com/