Understanding Cost Dynamics of Serverless Computing: An Empirical Study

The advent of serverless computing has revolutionized the landscape of cloud computing, offering a new paradigm that enables developers to focus solely on their applications rather than managing and provisioning the underlying infrastructure. These applications involve integrating individual functions into a cohesive workflow for complex tasks. The pay-per-use model and nontransparent reporting by cloud providers make it difficult to estimate serverless costs, impeding informed business decisions. Existing research studies on serverless computing focus on performance optimization and state management, both from empirical and technical perspectives. However, the state-of-the-art shows a lack of empirical investigations on the understanding of the cost dynamics of serverless computing over traditional cloud computing. Therefore, this study delves into how organizations anticipate the costs of adopting serverless. It also aims to comprehend workload suitability and identify best practices for cost optimization of serverless applications. To this end, we conducted a qualitative (interviews) study with 15 experts from 8 companies involved in the migration and development of serverless systems. The findings revealed that, while serverless computing is highly suitable for unpredictable workloads, it may not be cost-effective for certain high-scale applications. The study also introduces a taxonomy for comparing the cost of adopting serverless versus traditional cloud.