Abstract: With the development of cloud computing and the transformation of traditional industries, the increasing technical requirements and booming market demands make the traditional application software development paradigm face challenges. Meanwhile, a new generation of more economical and more potential cloud service models is urgently explored. Relying on container technology, serverless comput- ing provides high concurrency and compatibility, hides the details of underlying servers, and adopts a more economical service operation model charged by the number of calls or time. So it has aroused wide concern. Firstly, the concept of serverless computing and its system architecture and technical characteristics are introduced. Then, the current research statuses of serverless computing in scientific research, open-source community and industry are introduced. Whereafter, the implementation cases of serverless computing in several application fields are listed. Last but not least, the current challenges of serverless computing technology are described.

Key words: serverless computing, function as a service(FaaS), cloud computing, big data technology