Cloud-based applications are ubiquitous and essential. We expect them to be simultaneously scalable and available and simple to build and deploy. Virtual Programming Environments are what make these applications possible. Virtual Programming Environments are themselves complex distributed systems, built using the entire spectrum of System and Runtime Virtualization technology that is the subject of VEE. In the first part of the talk, I will focus on the purest form of Serverless Computing: Functions as a Service (FaaS) as embodied in Virtual Programming Environments such as AWS Lambda or Apache OpenWhisk. I will describe the programming abstractions they provide to the developer and how these abstractions are realized using virtualization technology. In the second part of the talk, I will outline the research challenges in moving beyond FaaS to build Virtual Programming Environments that can productively support building complex stateful applications on the cloud.

Dave Grove is a Distinguished Research Staff Member in the Hybrid Cloud Platform Department at the IBM Watson Research Center. He joined IBM in 1998, after completing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Washington. At IBM, he has worked on a number of projects in the general area of programming language implementation including Jikes RVM, Metronome, X10, and Swift@IBM. He is currently contributing to the re-invention of cloud programming models and cloud-native application development in the context of the Apache OpenWhisk and KAR open source projects. Dave is an ACM Fellow and has received three SIGPLAN “most influential paper” awards for his work on the optimization of object oriented languages.