The Ideal Foundation for a General Purpose Serverless Platform

The history of computing infrastructure has seen steady improvements over time, with cloud computing introducing concepts such as elimination of upfront hardware investments and elasticity. In 2015, AWS introduced Lambda, a serverless computing service that abstracts away infrastructure and provides finer-grained billing increments compared to traditional cloud computing. Since then, interest in serverless and cloud functions has grown, with all major cloud providers now offering similar services. However, current cloud functions have limitations such as lack of support for stateful applications, direct communication between tasks, access to hardware accelerators, and fine-grained coordination and control. The distributed computing framework Ray addresses many of these challenges and is considered the right foundation for a general purpose serverless framework.