Serverless Development Trends in Open Source: a Mixed-Research Study

Abstract: In the age of modern technology, a new paradigm, Serverless, emerges in the world of cloud computing with which it benefits developers to solely focus on the main objective instead of the maintenance of the infrastructure. This study helps developers and readers alike to have an insight into the current state of serverless software development. For the purpose of the research, an abundant amount of open-source serverless projects in Github has been analyzed with the help of Github bots, crawlers and Code Factor to gather data on common use cases, the complexity of the project and architectural patterns. Primary programming languages used to build serverless components are Javascript, Python, and C#. Furthermore, the common use cases identified in serverless projects are API, Frameworks, Communication, and data processing via Computation. The majority of analyzed projects were deemed dependent on the large vendors, primarily Amazon (72.03%) and Microsoft (21.21%). Only 3.96% of OSS projects were using open source frameworks. However, further studies are required as serverless applications will keep growing bigger in the near future.