# The Serverless Computing Survey: A Technical Primer for Design Architecture

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.12921 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12921/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Robust DNN Partitioning and Resource Allocation Under Uncertain Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21476/) (2025)
- [The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09240/) (2023)
- [SQUASH: Serverless and Distributed Quantization-based Attributed Vector Similarity Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01528/) (2025)
- [FSD-Inference: Fully Serverless Distributed Inference with Scalable Cloud Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15195/) (2024)
- [A Review of Deep Reinforcement Learning in Serverless Computing: Function Scheduling and Resource Auto-Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12839/) (2023)
- [Impute On-Demand: Adaptive Correlated Time Series Imputation for Changing Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23503/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of cloud infrastructures inspires the emergence of cloud-native computing. As the most promising architecture for deploying microservices, serverless computing has recently attracted more and more attention in both industry and academia. Due to its inherent scalability and flexibility, serverless computing becomes attractive and more pervasive for ever-growing Internet services. Despite the momentum in the cloud-native community, the existing challenges and compromises still wait for more advanced research and solutions to further explore the potentials of the serverless computing model. As a contribution to this knowledge, this article surveys and elaborates the research domains in the serverless context by decoupling the architecture into four stack layers: Virtualization, Encapsule, System Orchestration, and System Coordination. Inspired by the security model, we highlight the key implications and limitations of these works in each layer, and make suggestions for potential challenges to the field of future serverless computing.