*LESS'24

The 3rd edition of the workshop series on Serverless Computing for Pervasive Cloud-Edge-Device Systems and Services (*LESS) was held on March 11, 2024, co-located with the International IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom). The event's location was the Casino Municipal, a wonderful building with a full view of the Atlantic Ocean from the tall windows of the ballroom where coffee breaks and lunch were served. In the following days, the sand beach would be populated by tourists and surfers, despite being low season, overseen by seagulls flying over or picking small fish in the low water. But not today, when the cloudy sky and a chill breeze leave the majestic beach free of occupants.

*LESS started after a delicious French-Basque lunch with a packed room with more than 35 seats. After a brief welcome speech, the workshop organizers on site Claudio Cicconetti and Pablo Serrano left the floor to the keynote speaker Christian Becker . His presentation started with a trip down memory lane, reminding the older attendees (and teaching the younger ones) how the notion of excess capacity came into place with the explosion of end-user devices, which has led to cloud and, later on, edge computing. In the second part of the speech, he delved into the activities carried out in the past decade by his research team, which anticipated the current trend of serverless computing at the edge with the introduction of the concept of “tasklet”. The audience was captivated throughout the entire presentation and, at the end, it was eager to ask the speaker questions after questions about future research directions.

We then moved on to the next two presentations of the session. The first one was given by Josef Spillner, who illustrated the experiences and lessons learned from a trial in Ecuador involving the collection of data from edge computing / Internet of Things devices with serverless computing, with co-author Cristina Abad also joining the follow-up discussion from the audience. Next, Anton Semjonov presented the implementation of a distributed system to exploit excess capacity on personal devices from web browsers, using the emerging technology of WebAssembly.

It was then time for a coffee break upstairs in the ballroom, which was a great opportunity to have multiple parallel discussions about the topics touched by the keynote speech and the works just presented, in front of a cup of coffee or tea and cookies.

The second session resumed with Carlo Vallati , who presented a study on how to make the orchestration of Apache OpenWhisk more energy efficient when deployed on edge computing infrastructures. The efficiency of orchestration of job offloading at the edge was also the focus of the following presentation by Florian Maier, proudly on his first speaker appearance at an international event, who argued that optimal configuration of parameters is needed for latency-sensitive applications to avoid the advantage of processing close to the users goes wasted. Last, but not least, Sourav Kanti Addya, Ph.D. concluded the session with his presentation on how to assist a serverless platform scheduler in making effective decisions by considering both the energy consumption and the application latency, showcasing results not only in simulation but also in a Raspberry Pi cluster.

Finally, some time remained for a panel on the future of mobile serverless at the edge, where Christian Becker, Carlo Vallati, Pablo Serrano, and Claudio Cicconetti discussed with the audience the open challenges of serverless at the edge, especially concerning pervasive computing and systems. A key emerging takeaway message was that the research community would greatly benefit from standardized benchmarks and open testbeds, since too often researchers are forced to create their evaluation tools, which makes comparison with state-of-the-art clumsy, if possible at all, and slows down progress.

During the event, t-shirts with the logo of the EDGELESS project, funded by the European Union, were distributed to speakers and attendees, many of whom wore them in the following days of the conference. EDGELESS has the ambition of laying the foundations for cognitive applications to be deployed in the edge-cloud continuum, including resource-constrained and specialized devices. Check the project website and GitHub repository to stay tuned!