CFP: Fifth International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC) 2019

Part of 20th ACM/IFIP International Conference Middleware, Dec 9-13,
2019 in UC Davis, CA, USA. (http://2019.middleware-conference.org/)

The workshop will take place in UC Davis, CA, USA.

Over the last four to five years, Serverless Computing (Serverless) has
gained an enthusiastic following in industry as a 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, including Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions,
Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions. This workshop brings
together researchers and practitioners to discuss their experiences and
thoughts on future directions of serverless research.

Serverless architectures offer different tradeoffs in terms of control,
cost, and flexibility compared to distributed applications built on an
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) substrate. For example, a serverless
architecture 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/wosc5/


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
* Other topics related to serverless computing


Important Dates

Paper Submission: *September 15, 2019*
Notification of Acceptance: October 11, 2019
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): October 18, 2019
Author registration deadline: TBD
Conference: December 9-13, 2019


Papers and Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research/application
papers that are not being considered in another forum.

Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may
not exceed six (6) single-spaced double-column pages using ACM SIGPLAN
style, which can found on the ACM template page. The page limit contains
all the content, including bibliography, appendix, etc. Please note that
it is preferable, although not mandatory, to use a 10pt font instead of 9pt one.

Authors should submit the manuscript in PDF format. All manuscripts will
be reviewed and will be judged on correctness, originality, technical
strength, rigour in analysis, quality of results, quality of
presentation, and interest and relevance to the conference attendees.
Papers conforming to the above guidelines can be submitted through the
paper submission system powered by HotCRP (URL TBD).

All submitted manuscripts (following MIDDLEWARE conference requirements
on formatting and page limits) will be peer-reviewed by at least 3
program committee members. Accepted papers with confirmed presentation
will appear in the conference proceedings as well as in the ACM Digital
Library.


Workshop co-chairs

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


Steering Committee (tentative)

Roger Barga, Amazon Web Services
Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)


Program Committee (tentative)

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
Pedro Garcia Lopez, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain)
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)
Wes Lloyd, University of Washington Tacoma
Tyler Harter, GSL, Microsoft
Višnja Križanović, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek
Maciej Malawski, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
Pietro Michiardi, Eurecom
Lucas Nussbaum, LORIA, France
Eric Rozner, University of Colorado Boulder
Josef Spillner, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Rich Wolski, University of California, Santa Barbara