Serverless Edge Computing-Where We Are and What Lies Ahead

The edge-cloud continuum combines heterogeneous resources, which are complex to manage. Serverless edge computing is a suitable candidate to manage the continuum by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure, improving developers' experiences, and optimizing overall resource utilization. However, understanding and overcoming programming support, reliability, and performance engineering challenges are essential for the success of serverless edge computing. In this article, we review and evaluate the maturity of serverless approaches for the edge-cloud continuum. Our review includes commercial, community-driven offerings and approaches from academia. We identify several maturity levels of serverless edge computing and use them as criteria to evaluate the maturity of current state-of-the-art serverless approaches with a special focus on the programming, reliability, and performance challenges. Finally, we lay a road map toward the next generation of serverless edge computing systems.