Deviceless: A Serverless Approach for the Internet of Things

Developers of cloud-native applications have rapidly adopted the Serverless/Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm as it exempts them from provisioning and operating the infrastructure. Within this context, an interesting approach that can foster IoT applications’ development is extending the serverless paradigm towards the network edge to cover IoT environments: a paradigm that we refer to as ‘deviceless’. In this approach, an IoT infrastructure composed of devices deployed at the network edge can seamlessly be integrated as an application execution infrastructure to enable interactions with hosted sensors/actuators. This paper discusses several perspectives available in the literature on the (IoT) edge-based serverless paradigm and related use cases in an IoT/edge computing context. Besides, we present our preliminary prototype for implementing the deviceless approach to show its viability. We exploit the deviceless paradigm to conceive data pipelines under a flow-based development environment leveraging a geographically distributed IoT infrastructure.