Serverless Architecture and Its Current State of the Art: A Systematic Literature Review

The serverless architecture has progressively become one of the most popular way to build and deploy applications now a days. This architecture allows the developers to focus on their code without worrying about managing the backend servers. By using abstraction principle, the serverless approach makes it very easier to achieve scalability, automatic resource management and cost efficiency via pay per use model. With increase in the usage of the serverless approach, this architecture has now expanded into domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT), high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and the large-scale cloud environments. With the expansion of the serverless computing comes the challenges as well which include performance challenges, reliability and maintenance challenges. This review examines fifty peer-reviewed studies to present a structured overview of the current state of serverless computing and it also organizes the existing work into a taxonomy that shows key developments across application domains, technical methods, data sources and limitations while also identifying open the research directions. We found out that there is a clear evolution from simple function orchestration towards more intelligent, workload-aware scheduling systems with improved cold start latency and hybrid deployments ability that span both cloud and edge infrastructures. However despite of these advances the recurring issues such as vendor lock in, limited debugging visibility, difficulties in managing state and unpredictable performance still pose a challenge to widespread adoption of the serverless approach. Finally we would also like to add that the review highlights several promising directions for future research as well which includes adaptive resource management, distributed serverless runtimes, AI-driven optimization and better support for heterogeneous hardware. All in all our work offers a consolidated understanding of the current progress and future potential of serverless computing approach.