******* 2nd WoSC 2017 Workshop *******
Second International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC)
December 11th (Monday) and 12th (Tuesday) - the exact schedule will be available soon.
Las Vegas, NV, USA.
Held in conjunction with the 18th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware conference (MIDDLEWARE 2017). http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc2
****************************************

Serverless Computing (Serverless) is emerging as a new and 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 within the last two years, including Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk. There is, however, little attention from the research community. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss their experiences and thoughts on future directions.

Serverless architectures offer different tradeoffs in terms of control, cost, and flexibility. For example, this requires developers to more carefully consider the resources used by their code (time to execute, memory used, etc.) when modularizing their applications. This is in contrast to concerns around latency, scalability, and elasticity, which is where significant development effort has traditionally been spent when building cloud services. In addition, tools and techniques to monitor and debug applications aren't applicable in serverless architectures, and new approaches are needed. As well, test and development pipelines may need to be adapted. Another decision that developers face are the appropriateness of the serverless ecosystem to their application requirements. A rich ecosystem of services built into the platform is typically easier to compose and would offer better performance. However, composing external services may be unavoidable, and in such cases, many of the benefits of serverless disappear, including performance and availability guarantees. This presents an important research challenge, and it is not clear how existing results and best practices, such as workflow composition research, can be applied to composition in a serverless environment.

Authors are invited to submit research papers, experience papers, demonstrations, or position papers.

The latest version of this CFP is available at http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc2

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
* Debugging serverless applications
* Programming models
* Use cases, experiences
* Benchmarks
* Cost models, pricing models, and economics of serverless
* DevOps (customer side)
* Other topics related to serverless computing

Important Dates:

Paper Submission: September 29, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: October 21, 2017
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript Due: October 28, 2017


Papers and Submissions:

We are looking for the following types of submissions:

* Research and industry papers (up to 6 pages): Reports on original results including novel techniques, significant case studies or surveys. Authors may include extra material beyond the six pages as a clearly marked appendix, which reviewers are not obliged to read but could read.
* Position papers (up to 4 pages): Reports identifying unaddressed problems and research challenges.
* Abstracts (up to 1 page): An extended abstract on a preliminary or ongoing work.

Papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. All papers should follow ACM formatting instructions, specifically the ACM SIG Proceedings Standard Style. The author kit containing the templates for the required style can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template.

Submissions should not be blinded for review. Please submit your papers via the submission site: https://middleware17wosc.hotcrp.com/

All accepted papers will appear in the Middleware 2017 companion proceedings, available in the ACM Digital Library. All accepted papers will also be presented at the workshop, and at least one author of each paper must register for the workshop.


Workshop co-chairs:

Paul Castro, IBM Research
Vatche Ishakian, Bentley University
Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research
Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research

Program Committee:

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Azer Bestavros, Boston University
Flavio Esposito, Saint Louis University
Rodrigo Fonseca, Brown University
Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Tyler Harter, Microsoft
Pietro Michiardi, Eurocom
Peter Pietzuch, Imperial College
Rodric Rabbah, IBM Research
Rich Wolski, University of California, Santa Barbara