11th International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC11) 2025

Part of [1]ACM/IFIP Middleware 2025.

WoSC11 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 2025 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 WoSC11
and Middleware 2025.

Over the last eleven 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
micro-services. 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 popularity in enterprise and academia.
Several open source projects, such as OpenFaaS and Knative, aim to
provide developers with a 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 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 essential 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.

Emerging applications such as AI agents present interesting serverless
workloads patterns. These agentic solutions are characterized by
multiple LLM calls to process user requests and construct dynamic
plans, unpredictable orchestrations of API calls, and invocations of
deterministic code and AI models to reflect on API responses and make
progress towards a goal. They may be triggered by events, run quickly
for a few seconds or autonomously for days, and communicate with other
agents. These applications resurface known serverless challenges in a
new setting, including cold start, state management, and resource
allocation. They also raise new challenges such as mixed GPU and CPU
workloads, applications with stochastic plans, bursty long running
processes, inter-process communication, and integrations with agentic
programming models such as LangGraph and Crew AI.

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/wosc11/

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.
* Elastic AI platforms and pay-as-you-go for GPUs with different cost
metrics.
* Using AI assist and generative LLMs such as ChatGPT for building,
running, and maintaining serverless-like applications.
* Supporting AI agents and with serverless approaches in agentic
platforms
* Supporting Model Context Protocol (MCP) and using it in
serverless-like applications
* Supporting customization and running user provided AI models any
place: Cloud, Edge,Fog, IoT, etc.
* Developer experience as we transition from “traditional” serverless
and FaaS
* Serverless data management for AI, vector and graph databases
applied to serverless experience
* 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
* 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: September 24, 2025 (AOE)
Notification of Acceptance: October 19, 2025
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): October 27, 2025
Non-paper submissions (demos and other proposals): November 10, 2024
Author registration deadline: TBD
Conference: December 15-19, 2025

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.

Note that submissions must be doubly anonymous - authors’ names must
not appear on the manuscript, and authors must make a good-faith
attempt to anonymize their submissions.

Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the
standard ACM format style, which can be found on the [4]ACM template
page. The font size has to be set to 9pt.

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 26, 2025.

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://wosc2025.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.

Note that at least one author of each accepted workshop paper must hold
a full pre-conference registration.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you
can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has
been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a
commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors
([6]https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). The
collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement
throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability,
ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts
around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Anonymity Requirements for Doubly-Anonymous Reviewing

Every research paper submitted to ACM Middleware 2025 will undergo a
''doubly-anonymous'' reviewing process: in addition to maintaining the
anonymity of the reviewers of the papers, the PC members and reviewers
will not know the identity of the authors. To ensure the anonymity of
authorship, authors must at least do the following:
1. Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page
or elsewhere in the paper.
2. Funding sources must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper
under review; these can be added to accepted papers upon submission
of the camera-ready manuscript.
3. Non-anonymized links to the authors’ online content must be
removed.
4. Research group members, or other colleagues or collaborators, must
not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper.
5. The paper’s file name must not identify the authors of the paper.

Authors should also use care in referring to related past work. The
solution is to reference past work in the third person (in the same way
that one would reference work by anyone else). This allows you to set
the context for your submission while at the same time preserving
anonymity.

Despite the anonymity requirements, authors should still include all
relevant work, including their own; omitting them could reveal the
author's identity by negation. However, self-references should be
limited to the essential ones, and extended versions of the submitted
paper (e.g., technical reports or URLs for downloadable versions) must
not be referenced. The goal is to preserve anonymity while allowing the
reader to grasp the context of the submitted paper fully. It is the
responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity.
Papers that do not follow the guidelines or potentially reveal the
author's identity are subject to immediate rejection.

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
([7]https://wosc2025.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)

Cristina Abad, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (Ecuador)
Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Marc Sánchez Artigas, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Azer Bestavros, Boston University
Tyler R. Caraza-Harter, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rodrigo Fonseca, Microsoft
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
Kyungyong Lee, Kookmin University
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. https://middleware-conf.github.io/2025/
2. https://platformengineering.org/
3. http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc11/
4. https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
5. https://wosc2025.hotcrp.com/
6. https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs
7. https://wosc2025.hotcrp.com/